Platter's South African Wine Guide

South Africa’s first and still best-selling wine annual, Platter's Guide is the comprehensive, up-to-date and authoritative guide to who's who and what's what in the winelands. Featuring hundreds of producers, negociants and brands, and thousands of individual wines, Platter's Guide packs everything you need to know about the South African wine scene into an informative and entertaining format.
The Platter star ratings gives you a good indication of what to expect from a wine, where five stars is the highest rating a wine can get.   

Platter's Guide was conceived in 1978 by wine lovers and print journalists John and Erica Platter, after reading Hugh Johnson's ground-breaking Pocket Wine Book. The couple wryly recall that the first (1980) edition – an attempt at assembling a local version of the Pocket Book, recording as many of the why, where, when and how specifics as possible – was dismissed as “boring” and a “waste of their money” by a compositor employed by the very company commissioned to do the printing! But three decades, two Best Wine Guide Worldwide awards, and well over a million copies later, we’d like to think the Platters were onto something.

Veritas

After almost two decades the Veritas Awards has earned its reputation as one of South Africa’s most authoritative and credible competitions for market ready wines.

The Awards with its coveted Veritas emblem, has become synonymous with top quality wines. The results are trusted implicitly when international as well as local wine buyers use them to assist in their buying decisions and also when the ordinary wine lover simply selects a bottle from the shelf to enjoy with dinner.

The first National Bottled Wine Show in South Africa was introduced by the SANWSA in 1990 and renamed the Veritas Awards from 1991.

Gold and double gold awards are of significant value to the wine industry as well, as it offers a prestigious image for the wine, winery and winemaker and contributes to growth in sales.

Veritas is the only wine competition in South Africa for the industry by the industry and there is no commercial gain for the organisers, the South African National Wine Association (SANWSA).