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Johannes Schoombee LLD
General:
Johannes was born in Cape Town, South Africa and migrated to Australia in 1987. He is now an Australian and South African citizen. He has been a wine enthusiast since his first five years as a university student at Stellenbosch University in the early seventies. He has lived in England for three years, and Germany for six months.
Tertiary qualifications:
BA LLB (Stellenbosch; both cum laude); MA (Oxon); Doctorate of Laws (LLD) (Cape Town). At Stellenbosch University, Johannes won the University Medal for the top final year student in 1975 and thereafter attended Oxford as a South African Rhodes Scholar (South Africa-at-Large and New College 1976). He is a Barrister of the Inner Temple London, and has held senior, tenured positions in law faculties. He has practised as a barrister in Australia at the West Australian Bar since 1995.
Practice at the Bar:
In full time practice at the WA Bar since 1995, Johannes is now taking on matters on a selected basis and combining his practice at the Bar with a career in wine and wine consulting.
His trial and opinion work as a barrister has mainly involved high level commercial and public law matters. He has appeared in more than 50 reported cases.
He is a LEADR trained mediator and regularly partakes in mediations.
Wine qualifications:
The Wine and Spirits Educational Trust (WSET) of London, Diploma in Wines or Grade IV certification. This is the primary international wine qualification which ranks below Master of Wine.
It consists of six units with five having closed book exams (to be done in handwriting!). Three of these have a blind tasting component as well. The main unit, Still wines of the World (D3), involves in addition to the theory exam, a blind tasting and evaluating of 12 wines over a 3 hour exam period. The wines are divided in 4 flights, each consisting of 3 wines. Questions are then asked about the variety of grape, region of origin and country of origin in respect of different flights.
Johannes research paper for the D6 unit dealt with Sustainability and the Wine Industry and it available on this website with out the Appendices.
Champagne Master-Level Certificate from the Wine Scholar Guild in the USA.
WSET Level 3 Award in Wines and Spirits, with Merit. .
Travelling in wine areas:
Johannes has found this very rewarding and informative. He has cycled through many wine areas, and thus experienced closely varying terroirs and also local wines not generally available. Wine areas and regions visited include the following, with cycle tours indicated with an asterisk: France: Bordeaux, Left and Right Bank*; Dordogne*; Elsace (around Colmar)*; Luberon*; Provence*; Corsica. Italy: Tuscany; Naples and surrounds; Puglia; Sicily; Sardinia. Germany: along the Elbe River, northwards from Dresden*; Pfalz and Heidelberg*; southern Baden along the Rhine*. Germany/Austria: eastward from Passau on the Danube till Vienna*; Hungary; Croatia; Serbia; Turkey (also rural areas). Portugal: Lisbon; Porto; Douro valley to Pinhão, and in the south, Alentejo. Spain: Madrid; Barcelona; Galicia; Rioja Alta. Greece: Athens; the islands of Paros and Kefalonia. USA: Napa, Sonoma, Russian River in California*; Big Sur. Canada: Toronto; Niagara Peninsula; Annapolis Valley. South Africa, most wine areas (most recently in February 2024, the Western Cape). Australia: most wine areas, including Tasmania. NZ: Central Otago and Canterbury. England: East and West Sussex.
Following wine events and publications:
Johannes follows several wine websites, blogs and hard copy wine magazines like Grape Grower & Wine Maker, and the reports of Tim Atkin MW on countries or regions. He is a member of the WA and of the International Food and Wine Society, and of Wine Communicators Australia.
Languages:
Johannes grew up with English and Afrikaans, as well as Dutch literature, at school and university in South Africa. He can read German and converse in German, also having spent 6 months in Germany as a guest professor at the University of Regensburg, Bavaria. He is able to read French and make himself understood a simple level in French, having taken French courses and studied the French legal system and contract law, through French texts, at Oxford.
Teaching, presenting seminars, and publications:
When a tenured Associate Professor in the Murdoch Law School, Western Australia from 1991-4, the students rated him as one of the top two lecturers; this also applied to his time as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town. He is thus an experienced lecturer and presenter to small groups in tutorials. He has also presented numerous seminars during his time in legal practice.
He has published extensively in areas such as the control of regulatory administrative powers, privatisation, the interaction between private law and administrative law, the judicial review of the exercise of non-statutory powers (like contractual powers) and environmental impact assessment. He contributed a critique of the approval of Chevron’s Barrow Island LNG development in chapter seven of Bonyhady & Macintosh (eds) Mills, Mines and other Controversies (Federation Press; 2010).
Public interest (pro bono) work:
Johannes has a long history of public interest work in law. He initiated the WA Chapter of the Australian Institute of Administrative Law in April 1992 and was its first chairperson. He was the unremunerated chairperson (convenor) of the WA Environmental Defender’s Office Inc for some 20 years, and appeared pro bono for the EDO in many cases. In 2005 he was awarded the Community Service Award of the WA Law Society. In May 2008 he was the inaugural recipient of the WA Law Society’s “Lawyer of the Year” (senior lawyer) award. This was awarded on the basis of community legal services rendered notably in environmental law. In 2006 to 2009, he spent at his own expense a month each year in Cape Town, doing voluntary legal work on post-Apartheid land resettlement with the Legal Resources Centre. In 2013 he was included in the Honours List of the WA Conservation Council.