You have been around all corners of the Cape Winelands, yet it is to the Valley that you always long to return. The Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, that is, a portion of this earth cut by a heavenly scythe all those millions of years ago, which now lies in aching beauty under azure skies and is the birthplace of some of the best wines on from the Africa of South. Simple, just that.

And if wine was purely judged as an expression of the wonder and distinction of its sense of place, Hemel-en-Aarde would be at the forefront of the globe’s vinous offerings.

Despite having, over the past three decades, grown into an area with three distinct wards and a number of producers, the Hemel-en-Aarde’s mothership will always be Hamilton Russell Vineyards. There, where it all began with Tim Hamilton Russell’s exploratory forays into viticulture and winemaking, leading to his first vintage, an estate Pinot Noir, in 1981. Hamilton Russell Vineyards’ status as the leader of this pedigreed pack of the area’s fine wine producers was underscored this week with a characteristically convivial, atmospheric and engaging gathering on the estate to taste, among others, the new-release vintages of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and to jointly raise a glass to 45 years of winemaking at Hamilton Russell Vineyards.

Such visits to the spread outside the coastal town of Hermanus are always enriching experiences, days that folk like me count themselves blessed to be in the wine industry. Besides being the true Hemel-en-Aarde original, Hamilton Russell offers a brand of rarefied hospitality and certain character-laden features that are always truly unique and memorable.

A welcome in the underground barrel cellar was followed by a jaunt up the hill to Casa Anthony Hamilton Russell, second-generation proprietor, where the clearest, brightest of late-winter days had created a spectacular prism through which to view the Valley in all its magnificence: Runs of gun-grey granite hilltops, leading down to a patchwork of indigenous fynbos, bare vineyards and soils in a variety of pale, russet and earthily dark shades. The beauty, a marriage of dedicated and respectful agriculture and eternal nature, was compounded by the stillness of the air and the gentle beams of a friendly, smiling midday sun. It was magnificent.

A generous number of guests assembled on the porch of Anthony’s Braemar House, everyone in high spirits due to the day outside and the joy of being there, sipping glasses of cool Chardonnay and nibbling on the usual array of curated culinary offerings. But in this celebratory herd of bon vivants, there was truly only one that stood out, and that was the host himself, Anthony Hamilton Russell.

Impeccably attired, as usual, this time Anthony had forgone the light tweed jacket to don a très chic jacket made of dark velvet. The smile was warm and disarming as ever, and the scent from Anthony’s Romeo and Juliet Short Churchill Cuban cigar added to the atmosphere, which resembled a party scene in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, just without the stiff upper lips and anally retentive smirks.

Watching Anthony work the space, laughing and chatting to the array of members of the wine trade – some of whom he had never met before – I was reminded of the words of Robertson wine legend Danie de Wet, who said that, of all the people he had encountered in his 55 years in the wine industry, Anthony is the best ambassador for South African wine he had ever seen.

Together with this genuine personable charm, what continues to impress me about Anthony is his inextinguishable enthusiasm for his property and the only two wines made there: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. One each, that is, not a collection within a grape variety. This has been going on since he came back to Hamilton Russell Vineyards to take over from father Tim in the early 1990s, making Anthony’s success a masterclass of that five-letter word that is so lacking among many of today’s Cape producers, and that is focus.

The initial assembly on the Braemar porch led to a tasting on the spacious top level, where Anthony led the way – as usual – and the exercise was successful on two fronts. Fact is, guests are always impressed when the proprietor himself does all the introducing of and talking about the wines. And, secondly, due to his teeth-cutting in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, nobody in the region is more inextricably linked to this country than Anthony himself.

So, for anyone wanting a low-down on the geography, this was the correct address to come to and to listen. Iron and shale and clay soils. The raw, indecipherable vagaries of a southern Cape climate. Certain other locals tend to refer to the Hemel-en-Aarde region as a “little Burgundy”. An introduction by Anthony will correct this misassumption: unlike Burgundy, Hemel-en-Aarde is a severe coastal region, and there’s no limestone in the earth, mos. (Wine Guide for Dummies101)

The introductions to the new-vintage releases of Hamilton Russell Vineyards Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, both from the comet 2025 vintage, focussed on sense of place and the beauties of each variety without being bogged down with extraneous technical details.

Chardonnay, says Anthony, is like the child that does its homework on time, makes its bed in the mornings and occupies itself meaningfully throughout the day. Pinot Noir, that’s the kid that needs care and a sterner, disciplined and all-attentive hand.

Both kids, however, are gorgeous when grown at Hamilton Russell and vinified by winemaker Emul Ross, who, to my mind, has brought an added degree of refined accessibility to the wines.

Barely 20 months after vintage, Hamilton Russell Pinot Noir 2025 is as approachable as a recently divorced 50-year-old brunette at the Hermanus Golf Club, just without the hair-streaks, clunky jewelry or bumped-up Botox. The wine immediately charms with a wet rim of sour cherry and blossom before a beautifully honest pastoral tannic grip takes hold and squeezes gently. Hamilton Russell Pinot Noir shies away from any indication of velvety strokes and secretive whispers: the earth here offers a complete red-wine Pinot Noir, displaying the ethereal complexity of the heartbeat grape together with a firm spine and assertive personality. It is gorgeous and it is class. (10 months in oak, 25% new.)

The 2025 Chardonnay proves that, with the growing splendour of Cape Chardonnay offerings, Hamilton Russell is still in the leading charge. Nine months in wood, 25% new fill, the barrel is the frame allowing the canvas to dazzle. White flowers and grilled nuts. Key lime zest on melting Brittany butter. Expansive in the mouth, engaging, yet with a breezy curtain of zesty acidity allowing the joy to expand, glow, wonder.

These wines, this place, these people. It is heaven for a day, always remembered.

Rosé wines do not appear to get much thought in wine discussions due to their perceived accessible simplicity, with the two major distinctions within the category falling between the sweetish candy-floss pink wines and the drier, Provençal versions. The former were all the rage four decades back when Mateus Rosé – Portugal’s most famous export before Cristiano Ronaldo – determined the path of taste for pink wines.

When the wine world got all fussed about fruity wines daring to reflect their origin lying in what is a ripe, sugar-laden fruit called “grape”, general tastes ran drier. Hence the proliferation of dry rosés over the past two decades, most claiming to be inspired by the heartland of rosé wines and their culture, namely sunny, sexy, lavender-strewn fields, faux Van Gogh prints and George Clooney-occupied Provence.

However, within the offering of dry rosés lies another distinction, namely between pink wines that run flinty, herbaceous and bone-dry and those that, while still limited in the sugar-holding department, present a generosity in flavour and palate weight, as if, before pressing, the juice had been allowed to draw taste and structure from the red skins. No, not more time before the pressing of the grapes, as these rosés are still marked with the light shade of onion skin, revealing a scarcity of skin contact. It’s just as if the rosés have a depth of flavour a few steps above the less revealing Provençal styles.

These generous rosés, with their intriguing taste-delivering brushwork and revealing aromatic complexity, appear mostly to be made from Pinotage. During her tenure of terror as head of South Africa’s generic wine marketing body, WOSA, Su Birch reckoned that rosé was the only decent thing that could be made from Pinotage. Although a sharpish and naïve comment, Pinotage does do rosé well, as a couple of Cape cellars have shown. Kanonkop, for one.

The initial inspiration for using Pinotage for rosé came about on the slopes of the Simonsberg, there at Delheim Estate. In 1976, paterfamilias Spatz Sperling was still very much in control and – true to the tune of the wine industry – sat with a problem. South Africa was experiencing a hell of a glut of red grapes and wine, the situation not helped by the economic sanctions the rest of the world was imposing on the country’s products due to apartheid. Gold and diamonds were obviously not boycotted due to their desirability and necessity, but wine and fruit – verboten.

In any event, sitting with an unusable mound of Pinotage grapes, Spatz’s sidekick in the cellar, one Otto Hellmar, suggested using the Pinotage to make a rosé. There was no other Pinotage rosé being made, and with more than enough red wine to go around in the local market, a rosé offered an alternative proposition, while still utilising red grapes.

Thus, the country’s first Pinotage Rosé was made under the Delheim label from the 1976 vintage, and records show it was an immediate success. Back then the wine was slightly sweeter than it is today, and with his pink bow tie and vivacious personality, Spatz would tour the country each year, introducing the new vintage to wine drinkers, restaurateurs and hotel owners. Spatz and his mate Frans Malan from Simonsig would have an annual competition to see who could get their respective new vintages onto the market first, with Delheim’s Pinotage Rosé competing against the Simonsig Chenin Blanc for a claim to top honours.

Today, this rosé still shows a characteristic house style of Delheim. The colour has also lightened up over the years, from an initial undergarment-pink satin shade to a whisper of salmon. The nose is inviting and bears heady aromas of grapes, granite and fynbos, being possibly the most convincing evidence of Pinotage’s underrated aromatic components.

Always served chilled to the max, Delheim Pinotage Rosé offers delight and satisfaction from the first mouthful – rosé is never sipped; it is taken in thirsty draughts. Crisp and zesty, layers of dark and red berries gallivant about the mouth, the senses elevated by pheromone-activating shafts of oyster shell, wild olive and dried buchu.

Rosé might not receive the scores, comments and tributes red and white wines do, but for the thirsty and keen wine drinker, a good pink alone bears more than enough in its sheer presence in the mouth. And on the senses.

Even the wisest philosophers have never found a name for it: that irresistible longing to step into a painting and make a home inside its world. At times I have to fight the urge. Show me one of Paul Gauguin’s canvases, ablaze with impossible, dazzling colours and scented with the languid tropical air of Tahiti, and I want to climb through the frame. To pluck a ripe mango between the brushstrokes and walk barefoot along an endless beach of burnished gold.

One of David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings can make me kick off my shoes on the coldest winter’s day, ready to dive into that crystal water, slipping through those precise geometric lines into the depths of sapphire blue.

It is a yearning born of dreams. Yet, every so often, dreams find a way of becoming real to the point of tactile. And we have people who are seldom compared to artists to thank for this: the farmer.

For what else could the landscape between Caledon and Napier in the Overberg be but a work of art? The winter wheat stands verdant and lush, a luxuriant emerald sea stretching to the horizon, its untamed expanse interrupted only by gentle hills rising from the earth in graceful curves.

Beside the wheat lie fields of canola, blazing in the brightest yellow imaginable, thousands upon thousands of blooms glittering like stars that have drifted down from a Chinese night sky. Above these broad swathes of butter-yellow flowers and the undulating carpet of green wheat arches an endless blue sky, vast and silent.

I find myself wondering who could ever paint such perfection, capturing the precise moment when earth, light and growing things come together before my eyes. But no answer is needed. You have seen it as it is, and in that instant the vision belongs to you alone.

Winter also casts its own revealing light on the quiet wonders wrought by the winegrower. At Diemersdal in Durbanville, the vines stand bare, their spirit at rest as they gather strength for the awakening of spring. Their shoots have been pruned with purpose so that the coming bunches will set true, and the vineyard rows are etched across the lush green cover crop with almost military precision. Beneath each vine, the grey-brown earth beckons — fragments of rock broken apart hundreds of millions of years ago, now cradling the roots that are the lifeblood of the vine.

Watch as a veil of silver cloud settles above the neatly pruned vineyards in the late afternoon. The sinking western sun spills strokes of orange and crimson across the landscape. What the farmer has created here surpasses art itself.

Farther north, beyond the Piekenierskloof Pass, the valley of Citrusdal bursts into colour as orange trees proudly display their brilliant fruit. The trees are sturdy, crowned with generous domes of foliage as green as an Irish dream. The saffron-hued oranges bring light and joy to the landscape, so much so that even the unforgiving rock faces of the surrounding mountains seem to gaze down with a smile.

Perhaps farmers live inside these paintings every day. Perhaps that is why they do what they do. But every time I return, I find myself appreciating them anew: the creators of nature’s greatest masterpieces.

The brilliant bon vivant and American writer Jim Harrison claimed that man was not put on this earth to consume small portions. But then again, Jim did not stick around long enough to experience Ozempic.

Because, as the past six weeks of personal experience has shown, Ozempic plays God, having turned my once ravenous following of the Jim Harrison doctrine into one whose appetite for food and drink has taken on monistic proportions – although the donning of a sack-cloth habit and the urge to embark on the inspired chanting of hymns has yet to take shape.

But man, if a weekly jab of Ozempic can make me drive past Peregrine Farm Stall in Elgin without even thinking of pulling over for a pepper-steak pie, anything is possible.

Cutting to the chase, Ozempic – like other GLP-1 drugs such as Mounjaro – suppresses the desire to consume food and drink. That is just simply it. You eat and drink less. Not only does one feel sated after a few bites or sips, but the dopamine hit attached to the primal senses being bombarded by a slice of pizza Napoletana with added chilli or a long, cool glug of buttery Chardonnay disappears.

The long-term effects are, hopefully, the lowering of blood sugar and cholesterol as well as shedding a few kilograms. Ozempic, thus, is not rocket science. No banting, seawater enemas, Mediterranean dieting, 18-hour fasts or – heaven forbid – veganism. It just makes you do what your mum or Grandma always told you were the tricks to eating healthy, and that is to eat less.

This it does. As well as, and here the subject of wine comes in, limiting your urge to drink. Not only wine or other alcohol, by the way. Because of the constant sated feeling the drugs cause, downing my recommended two litres of water has become a slog, one akin to what a foie gras goose must experience thrice daily. I am also not washing down snacks of nuts and dry fruit with a pint of milk in the late-afternoon, as the desire for snacks of any kind has gone walkabout, drifting somewhere in outer space, hoping for its master to retrieve his hunger and lust for internal sensorial gratification.

So, if millions of wine-loving Ozempic and Mounjaro users are – like me – drinking less, I’ll go out on the shrinking limb and state that GLP-1s must be a reason why alcohol consumption is tanking worldwide. This insightful observation was vindicated recently while doing a wine-tasting for a bunch of Texans, with seven of the 20 admitting to jabbing GLP-1s and subsequently experiencing a decline in their consumption of Napa Valley Cabernet, Cognac and – as the lady from Houston said – “even fucking goddamn Dom Perignon!”

In my case, it started about a day after my first Ozempic needle, six weeks back. The initial experience was slight indigestion, with the feeling of having a wind sitting in your stomach making the body just feel, well, full and slightly bloated from the inside. Despite forcing down a can of baked beans, the wind was not expelled from any of the body’s two orifices normally reserved for such occasions, hanging around for about three days and making me feel constantly full. For the first time since my days of bland school-dinners in grey English afternoons, with the teachers watching your plate, I had to force myself to eat. Glasses of wine poured from habit, were half-emptied or – as the case on one depressing Tuesday evening – left untouched.

This was truly weird, as not only was I lacking any desire to eat, but the usual interest in the topic of food had vacated the body and soul. Not even a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson nibbling on a whole cylinder of cannelloni pasta could evoke a sense of culinary lust.

Things got better on the fourth day after the first Ozempic hit. At lunch at a sushi joint, I attacked the first sashimi and nigiri pieces with the usual gusto, but after five pieces the chopsticks were put down leaving the rest of the 16-piece sushi special in undisturbed peace, bright and colourful. I finished the glass of Sauvignon Blanc, refusing the refill and causing my usual waitress, Usurpia, to stare at me with a look veering between shock and worry.

Accordingly, the rhythm of the domestic evenings has changed. Dinners are cooked in copious amounts, but one helping of a modest portion is enough for me. In pre-Ozempic days, a languidly consumed large plate of osso buco followed by another smaller second helping and some baguette to mop-up the meaty sauces, would require at least three glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon to accompany the gusto of pleasurable eating.

Now, a single glass at dinner is ample, followed – maybe – by another while ensuring the Ozempic pen has been but back into the fridge and uncoiling your blood-pressure monitor.

While bottles were opened and emptied on a nightly basis, half-empty vessels are now recorked and placed in the refrigerator for later use.

Fortunately, the lesser volume of consumption has not interfered with the enjoyment of wine. In fact, my scientifically unsubstantiated yet personally experienced observation is that Ozempic has heightened my sensorial abilities. Like a Master of Wine candidate or a contributor to Platter’s Guide, I am able to detect layers of aromatic and flavour complexities in wines that I did not know existed. I can grasp onto the slightest hint of a sorrel sharpness in a Chablis, uncoil it from the rest of the flavours and ponder on this persuasive element’s meaning to the wine.

A glass of Médoc is not glugged down with a mouthful of rib-eye. Now it is examined, each component unpacked to stand before me screaming for identification and affirmation of grape and place, requests I honour in words, dreams and letters.

Portions may whither, but the appetite stays the same.

Whilst not having seen Christoper Nolan’s epic film of The Odyssey yet, a recent re-reading of Homer’s classic reminds one that this is as much a roadie movie of feasting and drinking as it is about one bloke’s lonely desire of embarking on an adventurous quest home. Recognised as the Western world’s first literary work, The Odyssey (8 centuries bC)is thus also the first book where the beloved offering that is wine plays a profound role in the situational narrative of one of the great coming home stories.

Homer didn’t just spin a yarn about a man trying to get home after a spot of light genocide at Troy. No, The Odyssey is a boozy epic, a 12 000-line pub crawl through the Aegean where wine isn’t merely a beverage – it’s the plot’s lubricant, the hero’s secret weapon, and the clearest marker of who’s civilised and who’s a one-eyed milk-swilling savage. (Cyclops, that is.)

If the sea is wine-dark, it’s because the entire Mediterranean has been one long, regrettable symposium since the Bronze Age. Odysseus doesn’t sail home; he tacks from one trough to the next, proving that the road to his kingdom Ithaca is paved with emptied wine amphorae and bad decisions.

Consider the suitors first. These parasitic oafs have turned Odysseus’s hall in Ithaca into an all-you-can-eat-and-drink atrocity. Day after day – years, really – they gorge on his sheep, his goats, his fatted cattle, and wash it all down with Odysseus’s cellared wine, the good stuff laid down for the master’s return. These suitors carouse like it’s last orders at the end of civilisation.

Penelope, Odysseus’s virtuous wife awaiting her love’s return, sits upstairs, weaving and unweaving her shroud, while downstairs it’s a perpetual lads’ night: meat, bread, more meat, more wine, occasional lyre-strumming, and the continual plotting to shag the unwilling hostess.

This is the ancient Greek equivalent of a stag do that’s forgotten the wedding exists. Homer describes these banquets with the relish of a restaurant critic who’s spotted the bill being padded. The suitors aren’t villains so much as grotesques of excess, gluttons whose appetites have outgrown any sense of xenia, that sacred hospitality which demands you treat a guest like a god rather than a free bar.

Hospitality, in Homer’s world, is feasting with rules. You don’t just slap a steak on the table; you sacrifice, roast the choice bits, mix the wine properly (watered, you barbarian: neat wine is for Cyclops and other subhumans), pour libations to the gods, and only then get stuck in. Penelope’s randy barbaric suitors, however, invert this: they consume without offering, devour without gratitude.

Their eventual slaughter during yet another feast feels less like justice and more like a health-and-safety intervention. Antinous gets an arrow through the throat mid-gulp. Blood instead of wine – poetic, if you like that sort of thing. Odysseus, the long-suffering host, has arrived and finally called time.

Contrast this with the proper dos. Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope, pops over to Nestor’s in Pylos and it’s all ritual decency: sacrificed bulls, the animals’ tongues burned for the gods, wine mixed and passed with prayers. At Menelaus and Helen’s crib in Sparta, the wine gets an Egyptian happy pill – some herb that banishes sorrow so effectively you could watch your entire family get minced and still crack on with the canapés.

Helen, ever the charming hostess, drugs the bowl and launches into war stories. It’s the ancient world’s answer to Prozac and a TED Talk. The men feast, reminisce, and feel nothing. Civilisation at its most sophisticated: medicated oblivion with a side of roast loin.

Then there are the Phaeacians, those lucky sods living in a perpetual holiday brochure. Alcinous’s palace hosts Odysseus with baths, fresh clothes, golden goblets, Demodocus the bard belting out ancient Greek hits, and – again – endless wine. Games, gifts, more feasting. It’s the sort of place where even shipwrecked nobodies get the full five-star treatment.

Odysseus weeps into his cup listening to songs of Troy, but the Phaeacians press on with the hospitality. One almost envies them: a society organised around making strangers feel welcome with wine and song rather than spreadsheets and passive-aggression. Homer makes it sound idyllic, but one suspects the hangover the next morning was biblical.

Ah, but the real comic gold is the monsters. Polyphemus the one-eyed giant Cyclops is the ultimate anti-host. He eats guests whole, showing a penchant for Odysseus’s loyal men. No appetisers, no small talk, just crunch. Odysseus, ever the opportunist, rolls up with a skin of Maron’s super-wine, honey-sweet, god-like stuff that normally gets diluted twenty parts water to one of booze. The Cyclops, milk-drinker that he is, guzzles it neat.

Three bowls in and the great one-eyed one is legless, declaring “Nobody” will be eaten last. Then comes the vomiting: wine and bits of comrade. The cave reeks of a kebab shop toilet at 03.00. Odysseus blinds him with a sharpened stake while the brute snores. Here wine, the greaet civiliser, is weaponised against barbarism. It’s not just drunk; it’s tactical. Homer understands that alcohol reveals character. Give it to a hero and he schemes; give it to a monster and he belches human flesh.

Another tavern of transformation is found in the place inhabited by temptress witch Circe. She mixes kykeon – barley, cheese, honey, heady heavy Pramnian wine – spiked with drugs. Odysseus’s men slurp it down and turn into pigs. Literal oinkers. The goddess-hostess turns feasting into farmyard.

Odysseus, moly-protected, resists, beds her, and stays for a year of “feasting on plenteous meat and delicious wine” in between strenuous bouts of bonking with Circe the witch. The crew has to remind him about home, and no doubt the waiting celibate wife that is Penelope.

Elpenor, a treacherous merchant and member of the Cult of Kosmos who serves as one of your primary early-game antagonists, gets pissed, falls off the roof, and dies. Moral: don’t get blotto and sleep on roofs. Even the enchantress Circe knows the drill: wine first, spells later. It’s less black magic than a particularly aggressive happy hour.

Throughout Homer’s tale, wine is both fuel and folly. It invigorates, bonds men, honours gods, and occasionally saves the day. But excess? That’s for suitors, Cyclops, and careless crewmen.

Odysseus survives because he knows when to drink and when to pour it down the enemy’s gullet. His men perish because they don’t. The Lotus-Eaters offer forgetfulness without even proper wine; the Sun God’s cattle are eaten in hunger, breaking every taboo. Feasting without limits leads to shipwreck. Literally.

Homer’s world is one where a man is judged by his table. Proper xenia – generous, ritualised, moderate – separates Greeks from the rest. The suitors’ endless trough is anarchy; Polyphemus’s cave is nightmare; the Phaeacians’ palace is paradise. Wine-dark sea indeed: the whole voyage sloshes with it. Odysseus isn’t just cunning; he’s the designated survivor of antiquity’s longest booze cruise.

In our own age of craft beers, natural wines, and wellness retreats that ban the stuff, Homer feels refreshingly honest. We pretend alcohol is a problem to be managed with apps and therapy. The ancients knew better: it’s the stuff of life, gods, monsters, and homecoming. Just water it down, offer some to Zeus, and for pity’s sake don’t eat the guests. Or sleep on roofs. Or trust a hostess with herbs from Egypt.

The Odyssey ends with Odysseus reclaiming his hall, slaughtering the drinkers, and restoring order. Peace, at last. Until the next feast. Because in Homer, there is always another feast. Another bowl passed. Another chance to prove you’re not a pig, a Cyclops, or a suitor. Raise a cup to that. But mind the dilution.

Whoever is going to rescue the calf from the well remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: 2026 is unlikely to be remembered as the Year of the Cow.

First came the foot-and-mouth disease crisis, lurching awkwardly between agricultural disaster and political football while making life miserable for cattle farmers. Now another calamity has befallen meat lovers. South Africa, we’re told, is facing a shortage of oxtail.

Yes, glorious, gelatinous, gravy-rich, soul-warming oxtail. That magnificent cut which, after hours of slow cooking, yields meat so tender it slips effortlessly from the knobbly bones before making the short journey to an eagerly waiting mouth.

So here’s some advice for fellow devotees: if you see oxtail for sale right now, buy it. Oxtail Day Zero might just be around the corner-fence.

Thanks to one or another bureaucratic tick lodged somewhere between Argentina and South Africa, the local market could lose around 1 000 tonnes of oxtail. About 70% of the country’s supply comes from Argentina, simply because South Africans have developed a far greater appetite for oxtail than our own cattle population can satisfy. Fortunately, with more than 50 million cattle roaming the Argentine pampas, our South American amigos have always had enough tails to spare for their neighbours in the Southern Hemisphere.

Anyone who has bought oxtail recently will know it has become something of a luxury. Yet for centuries it was regarded as poor man’s food, much like lobster and oysters once were.

For generations, oxtail belonged to the category of leftovers and off-cuts. In fact, the reason the Caribbean is famous for its richly spiced oxtail dishes is a painful one. Plantation owners handed the “discarded” parts of the animal – the tail, tripe, feet and head – to enslaved people, who transformed these unwanted scraps into dishes of astonishing flavour. The same story unfolded throughout the slave-owning American South.

Britain, too, long regarded oxtail as food for the working classes. Among those who embraced it were the French Huguenots who fled religious persecution in the seventeenth century. English food historians credit these resourceful Francophile refugees with elevating the humble tail through their imaginative cooking, helping turn it into what later became a cherished British classic.

Closer to home, the legendary food writer C. Louis Leipoldt was an ardent admirer of oxtail. He maintained that a touch of Cape Malay spice brought out its finest qualities. Leaf through the recipes and photographs of South African food writers over the decades and you begin to suspect that whoever coined the phrase “Rainbow Nation” must surely have been a vegetarian.

Because whether black, white, coloured, Indian or anything in between, South Africans seem united by one thing: a deep affection for a pot of oxtail, each community preparing it in its own beloved way. Curried and tucked into slices of white bread. Slowly braised in tomato and onion and served over mieliepap. Simmered in an entire bottle of Pinotage and eaten with freshly baked roosterkoek.

Perhaps there are few dishes that tell our shared story quite as honestly as oxtail.

And, by the way, why do we call it foot-and-mouth disease? A cow has hooves, not feet. Which is just as well, because anyone who has ever enjoyed properly cooked trotters knows they deserve the same culinary reverence as the tail.

Besides, every cow comes with four of them.

Definitions of a cult wine are hardly definable; the interpretation of what makes a wine deserving of cult status depends on what the person making the judgement has in mind. Some would deem any wine made by a boy or girl of engaging, inimitable personality deserving of cult status due to the persona behind the bottles. For others, cult wines must be scarce and hellishly expensive, with desirability and collectability more important than the actual quality of what is inside the bottle.

Thus, one can go on and on, but the fine thing about according a wine cult status is that the only voice that can bestow such a status is the individual him- or herself. Cult is not a collective.

For me, there are only two cult wines in South Africa: the GS 1966 Cabernet and KWV’s 1953 Muscadel Jerepigo. These warrant my use of the word “cult” due to their scarcity, mystery and individuality. And, of course, the sheer incomparable quality and deliciousness found in every glass poured from these rarities.

Thanks to David Finlayson introducing James Molesworth of Wine Spectator to the GS Cabernet 1966 some two decades ago, this astounding wine has attracted international attention. Jancis Robinson, for one, awarded it a full 20 out of 20, with the wine’s backstory adding to its allure.

The other South African great, KWV Muscadel 1953, has not received the same degree of attention. But having sampled it again last week, I would state with assured confidence, and after considerable reflection, that this is the other cult wine from the Cape, one that deserves to be seen as an example of the very best South Africa can produce, as well as an integral part of the nation’s vinous legacy.

While George Spies, the father of GS 1966, sought to emulate Pauillac from a vineyard in Durbanville, the KWV 1953 Muscadel captures the country’s centuries-old commitment to fortified wines, specifically those made from the Muscat de Frontignan grape. But, and this is the kicker, it does so to a superlative degree of distinguished quality one is unlikely to find in any fortified Muscat in South Africa, or indeed anywhere else in the world.

The KWV 1953 possesses a level of uniqueness, as I heard from Gary Baumgarten, who was working at the KWV while this wine was still in barrel.

First up, Gary says, the 1953 vintage was one of the coldest the Cape had experienced, with snow lying on the mountains while pickers made their way through the vineyards. The grapes for this wine were harvested in Robertson, where the juice was fortified before being sent to the KWV head cellars in Paarl.

Another factor differentiating the KWV 1953 Muscadel is that the initial winemaker veered away from the practice of immediately fortifying the juice with spirits. Instead, the juice was given tartaric acid and allowed to ferment on the grape skins to 5°B before fortification took place. This, according to Gary, is the reason for its immense flavour and low pH of 3.5.

The fortified wine was trucked to the KWV, where it was still lying in 10,000-litre wooden vats when Gary arrived to work there in 1980. He and the other winemakers were asked to draw samples of the various Muscadel vintages in the KWV cellars, and the exceptional quality of the 1953 was immediately apparent. The wine was eventually bottled in the 1980s with its distinctive gold label. “By far the best Muscadel ever made in South Africa,” says Gary.

The bottle I opened last week was thus 73 years old, and it was one of the few experiences in my life where silence, thought and wonder seemed the most adequate superlatives. But once awakened from the initial dream-like experience, suffice it to say that any lover and appreciator of the fermented grape would share this admiration.

The wine lies black in the glass, tinged with green, the colour of the dark spots on a live brown trout. Or that of a black mamba that has just crawled through an organic Swartland vineyard. And then the wine makes its commanding presence further known upon entering the mouth. Soft as the stroke of a feather freshly fallen from the wing of an angel bathing in honey. Smooth, sensual and rich as the bonnet of a black Bugatti still damp from the sweat of the Sicilian model who had adorned the vehicle for a Pirelli Calendar photoshoot.

The flavour is shockingly decadent, overpowering and seductive. Jasmine nectar and Colombian coffee beans soaking in Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Pulverised sultana raisins lying under the hot sun of Kakamas. Molasses dripping, running down your mouth and scooped up with a spoon made from Cuban sugar palm.

Dark, rich, intoxicating, heady and funk-filled as a Miles Davis riff at full throttle. Yet quiet and dreamlike, leaving an indelible mark of cult status and that mysterious void only mystery can create, only secrets can hold. Not so much a wine as an experience, deserving of those who seek to remember a life well lived.

Being the leading arbiter of unsighted wine judging in South Africa, the Investec Trophy Wine Show’s uncloaking of a Trophy-winning Pinot Noir at this year’s show hopefully adds impetus and reason to those believing that, yes, Pinot Noir and the Cape of South Africa do match extremely well and with enthralling brilliance.

Getting here took some time. Fifteen long years had to pass before Trophy Show chair Michael Fridjhon and his esteemed local and international judges found a wine from this category worthy of anointing with a trophy – in this case the Paul Clüver Estate Pinot Noir 2024 from Elgin. Gazing from the outside, and being a fervent fan of Pinot Noir, this is, for me, a big deal, and the recognition from this show’s notoriously stringent judges will hopefully allow the wine fraternity to cut local Pinot Noir producers some slack by admitting that it is, too, an accomplished category of Cape wine, worthy of more serious attention than it is getting.

Too many scribes, commentators and industry figureheads tend to execute that bored, dismissive eye-roll when one mentions Cape Pinot Noir. The tedious reaction is driven by emotion and nostalgia. And who cannot blame these folk for being seduced by the red wines from the variety’s ancestral home, the mythical beauty that is Burgundy? However, really, this seduction does not have to be so overwhelming as to limit one’s vision with blinkers, causing all other nations’ Pinot Noirs to suffer by comparison with the wines made in this grape’s regal ancestral home.

With some 1,200ha of Pinot Noir planted in South Africa, only about 600ha finds its way into bottled still wines, the rest being used in Cap Classique. Yes, top Cape Pinot Noir is few and far between, but then access to fruit is limited. A general survey of the local Pinot Noirs on offer will lead one to admit that the quality varies from steady to brilliant, with ghastly examples being few. Yet try some tannic entry-level village wines from Burgundy and the rot-gut quality of this stuff will be a wake-up call to the crowd claiming all of Burgundy is great.

Looking at the Trophy-winning Paul Clüver Estate 2024, I see an example of South African Pinot Noir with a distinctive veil of Cape cool-climate originality. It does not taste of France, Oregon, New Zealand or Tasmania: it is this country’s very own, very brilliant interpretation of the story the great grape of Pinot Noir wishes to tell.

And while my limited wine-judging skills would not even allow me access to the Trophy Show judges’ tea room, I’d wager that some aspects I see in this wine were experienced by them, too.

The overriding impression of this wine is one of purity and clarity, a lucidity, an overall impression of various components joining to create a Pinot Noir of struck tuning-fork precision. Yet, in the vast tomes of rapturous commentary on the great Pinot Noirs, it is the cultivar’s tendency to veer off the track of balance and precision that appears to muster the greatest appeal.

Here, it is the murmured whispers of damp autumnal forest floor apparent in wines deemed so impressionable, together with that “unique” feral, fleshy, sensual aroma. Brushstrokes from the wilderness, the clichéd garrigue, also define Pinot Noir’s greatness, egged on by a clod of mushroom earthiness. When regal Pinot Noirs – aka Burgundian – are spoken about, these are the sensorial aspects highlighted to trumpet their superiority.

Paul Clüver Estate Pinot Noir 2024 has none of these. The aroma is refined and clean and devoid of wet leaves and thigh-sweat. There is just sun, fruit and pure mountain air. The aromatic introduction extends to the palate. Like a sliver of Carrara marble, it captivates, allures and charms with relentless, life-affirming natural beauty. Bright red fruit warms in the mouth to provide a tantalising glow. A shudder of blackcurrant offers comfort to the senses, with soul and nature combining with winemaking skill to create something where deliciousness, wonder and culture unite as one.

On the mid-palate, where it’s make-or-break for Pinot Noir due to the thin-skinned grape’s wont to deliver uncomfortably jarred layers of tannin, this Paul Clüver Pinot Noir is as seamless as a Jannik Sinner backhand stroke, acidity, fruit and sugar wrapped in a silk bracelet and tied with a secure, confident bow.

This wine’s overall harmonious, settled and unfettered nature will lead to questions seeking that Pinot Noir “edge”, the unexpected drama and broodiness that swims against vinous convention, for which the grape is so famous. Well, as Paul Clüver’s Pinot Noir shows, classic beauty and brilliance can also lie in the egalitarian harmony and accuracy of straight-lined clarity.

Will anyone dare say that the art of David Hockney, with its sunlit brightness, crisp ruler-lines and vivid colours, is incapable of creating wonder and thought? So too the luminous prose of Raymond Carver and a long, brassy blow from Chet Baker.

To me, it is this precise, respectful interpretation of Pinot Noir that gives great South African wines made from this grape a signature of individuality and distinction. A nation of sun, fruit and soil we are. Put a human soul, understanding and skill set behind it, and the result is a rendition of Pinot Noir truly worth shouting about. Clearly.

From Die Burger, 26 June 2026

Although South African winemakers are currently producing the finest wines in the country’s history, the same level of expertise is, unfortunately, not shared by the industry bodies responsible for the regulations and legislation these highly skilled and respected producers are required to follow. A recent spate of absurd decisions emanating from the country’s wine authorities should serve to illustrate this point to anyone still in doubt.

The first concerns the production of wine from old vineyards, a category that has captured the imagination of both local and international wine lovers over the past decade. South Africa is blessed with an abundance of mature vineyards whose age and accumulated experience are key factors in producing distinctive wines of character.

Producers who make wine from these veteran vineyards are entirely justified in drawing attention to this fact on their bottles. “Old Vine” or “Old Vines” frequently appears on labels, or “Ou Wingerd” in Afrikaans, alongside the usual vintage, cultivar, region and other required information.

This year, however, the country’s wine authorities have decided to interfere with this long-established practice. The Afrikaans term Ou Wingerd remains acceptable. But producers using English on their labels – by far the majority, given the importance of export markets – are now required to alter their wording when referring to old vineyards.

The term “Old Vine” may only be used on a label if the wine in the bottle is made from a single vine. Otherwise, producers are required to use the plural, “Old Vines”. This ruling has caused considerable frustration among producers who have long used “Old Vine” on their labels, as it now forces them into costly and time-consuming label redesigns.

The absurdity of legally enforcing the distinction between “Old Vine” and “Old Vines” becomes evident when one considers the realities of viticulture and winemaking—subjects about which those responsible for drafting this regulation appear to know remarkably little. The simple fact is that no wine is made from a single vine.

On average, one vine yields approximately 4.5 kilograms of grapes. Depending on the winemaking process, this quantity produces roughly five bottles of wine.

Which raises the obvious question: who on earth is going to produce a commercial wine consisting of just five bottles? Because only a wine made from a single vine would qualify to use the designation “Old Vine”. Such microscopic logic renders the rigid distinction between “Old Vine” and “Old Vines” entirely incomprehensible, leading one to conclude that officials occupying desks within South Africa’s wine industry bodies have little more worthwhile to occupy their time.

To date, the relevant authorities, namely those within South Africa’s Wine Certification Authority, have been unable to provide any explanation for this official distinction despite repeated enquiries from the media.

What makes the situation particularly ironic is that South Africa’s entire old-vine movement is driven by the Old Vine Project, known in Afrikaans as the Ou Wingerdprojek. It will therefore be interesting to see whether the organisation now feels compelled to rename itself the “Old Vines Project”.

The second peculiar piece of proposed legislation relating to wine labels lies ahead, and it demonstrates the same lack of logic and industry understanding as the first.

The authorities are now advocating that descriptive terms be placed prominently on the front labels of producers’ wines, such as “Dry White Wine” or “Dry Red Wine”.

The first question is why these obvious descriptions need to be emblazoned across the front label when they can quite adequately appear on the back label without compromising the appearance and integrity of the brand. And once again, one has to ask what practical purpose these arbitrary front-label descriptions are meant to serve.

Just as BMW or Mercedes-Benz are not required to print the words “Fast German Car” across the bonnet of their vehicles, it surely cannot be necessary to tell consumers buying a Meerlust Rubicon or a Kanonkop Paul Sauer, via the front label, that the wine is a “Dry Red Wine”. The brand and the wine’s name already say everything that needs to be said, and if further explanation is required, the back label is precisely where such information belongs.

Indeed, placing “Dry White” or “Dry Red” prominently on the front label strips a wine of its premium image, since these types of generic descriptions are generally associated with inexpensive boxed wines where only the most basic information about the contents is considered necessary.

Like every wine-producing nation in the world, South Africa faces numerous challenges. One would hope that the relevant authorities would devote more of their time, resources and intellectual energy to developing meaningful strategies, offering support and providing practical guidance to producers, rather than concerning themselves with bureaucratic trivialities. South Africa’s wine producers deserve better, because they are the ones doing the hard work and carrying the industry forward.

It was one of those days in the wine industry when one wondered: just what the hell are you doing here? Parked at the gate of a winery called Mont du Toit outside the town of Wellington was a brand that – despite my having heard its name and seen the label – had not succeeded in piquing even the remotest amount of interest.

The only factor that had persuaded me to make the journey, midweek on a grim Boland winter’s day, was Philip Costandius, one of the Cape’s most seasoned and interesting winemakers, who has been at Mont du Toit’s vinous helm since 2019. Philip’s CV includes stints at Delheim, Neethlingshof and Oldenburg and, prior to our first meeting two decades ago, I had asked wine merchant and overall wine grand dame Caroline Rillema what he was like.

“Oh, Philip’s an intellectual, you know,” she said. “He reads history and stuff.”

As befits an interesting and understated bloke, Philip’s invitation to a farm previously unknown to me turned into a welcome and enriching experience, the name Mont du Toit now firmly attached to my weathered cranial faculty.

Philip was Philip – sporting a dense, well-groomed silver moustache of which Inspector Hercules Poirot would be proud – and our mutual humorous engagement was complemented by the creasing of his forehead and the glint in a pair of eyes that always appeared bright and inquisitive.

We had hardly had time to swap notes on facial hair and intellectual literature before I found myself ensconced in a bakkie next to a distinguished gentleman I had never met before. He was Stephan du Toit, a senior counsel from the Johannesburg Bar who had bought Mont du Toit in 1996.

Leaving Philip behind to attend to cellar matters, Stephan and I headed for the farm’s vineyards. The Hawequa Mountains overlooking the spread looked dramatic and surly beneath a gun-grey sky sheeted with low clouds. The soil was wet, red and rocky in places. The vines were almost bare, only a few russet leaves hanging forlornly from tired shoots, their energy depleted after the 2026 harvest.

Shiraz, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Viognier and others: some 22 hectares set on drifts and subtle slopes.

As usual, I pried Stephan about his wine-farming ambitions and how these fitted within his legal career. It turned out his father had owned a wine farm in Stellenbosch, and fond memories have a way of burrowing into one’s consciousness until one decides to get as close as possible to reliving them. Like buying your own wine farm.

Being proudly and fiercely attached to his French Huguenot heritage – like myself – the idea of a Wellington farm appealed to Stephan. Franschhoek has laid claim to Huguenot legacy and culture, but the truth is that, a century after the Huguenots set up shop there in 1688, Wellington had the largest number of people descended from the refugees fleeing various forms of persecution in France.

It was when we started talking about wine and various wine-producing countries that things became really interesting. Portugal came up and, when regions, grape varieties and wineries were mentioned, I could not help but note that, although we were speaking Afrikaans, Stephan pronounced the Portuguese names with authentic accents.

It turned out that Stephan’s father had been South African ambassador to Portugal in the 1950s and, due to his schooling in the Land of the Big Bacalhau, my host remained fluent in Portuguese. In fact, he had just translated a seminal work by the 16th-century writer Luís Vaz de Camões from Portuguese into Afrikaans and was busy with the editing process.

Back at the cellar for a quick look around, Philip added that Stephan’s father had, after Portugal, also been ambassador to Paris and that, yes, the Mont du Toit owner was fluent in French as well.

Whether Mont du Toit’s cultural and intellectual gravitas had motivated Philip to work on the farm is unknown, but it is precisely the kind of environment in which one could expect him to continue his winemaking career.

A tasting of the wines with Stephan and Philip took place in a tasting room that also serves as the owner’s part-time office, for when we returned from the cellar he was working through an intimidating pile of paperwork. Well into his eighties, Senhor/Monsieur/Meneer is still at it.

The visit focused on red wines, and I was given the impression that Shiraz is a grape for which Stephan and Philip have a particular affinity. Not a bad call, considering that Wellington’s geographical position has, over the years, proven itself a piece of earth conducive to distinctive expressions of this Rhône stalwart.

The line-up included Mont du Toit Shiraz from the 2021 to 2025 vintages and, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I am inclined to think of Thys Louw of Diemersdal fame describing wines as “honest”. These are wines made with minimal fuss, devoid of showiness and – honestly – crafted simply to express the earth, climate, aspect and soils in which the vines are rooted.

Estate fruit is vinified in a cellar that uses gravitational flow. Ageing takes place mostly in used barrels, with a 20% new oak component providing polish and tightening the wine’s backbone.

The standout vintage for me was 2023. Here, the Shiraz drifted away from its plush, dark-fruited sappiness towards that delicious Shiraz character of mocha and Havana cigar-box cedar, attributes the variety reveals only in certain vintages. And an effect of oak it is not, given the minimal use of new wood.

The 2021 vintage was arguably the most complete wine, with five years of age providing a settled calm beneath which compote notes of blackcurrant, mulberry and pine needle lay brooding, dark and moerig within a frame of firm tannins. The Mont du Toit Shiraz 2025, meanwhile, was bright and randy, overflowing with voluptuous juiciness that whetted a dry, maritime reef of oyster shells.

I loved the earnest nature of these wines, especially in a world where – due to having fallen out of commercial and critical favour – Shiraz and Syrah are increasingly becoming over-stylised showpieces in which the emphasis on perfume and upfront fruit dulls authenticity and, well, honesty.

Mont du Toit is open for tastings by appointment and, by the way, the tasting room is worth visiting for the splendid Cape Dutch furniture alone. Now I certainly know what I was doing there.