Obituary: Jan Boland Coetzee (20 January 1945 – 12 September 2025)

Your soul is already in heaven, and soon your body is to be embraced by this earth, and this is good because it is the soil you always loved, and I believe that just like we did, earth and soil love you. In life and in death, you are a true son of the soil.

You spoke often of the land and the earth. The cool red sand of the Sandveld out on the West Coast where potatoes and herenbone grow. Those salt-pans at Lambert’s Bay, where as a barefoot boy you began playing rugby, the crusty surface’s harsh, blinding white light as you ran with the ball; the sharp pain as the pan’s brittle dry cover grazed your knees in the tackle, and the sting of the salt as it soaked into your bloodied flesh.

Later, from 1968, the soils were on the hills of Kanonkop where you prepared the decomposed granite for planting Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinotage vines, digging and scraping through the surface, and manually working 50 tons of limestone into each hectare of earth.

Soil. Wet soil. The ankle-deep mud of a wet Newlands rugby pitch where you played for Province and for country; the gritty chalk pebbles of the Clos des Mouches vineyard in Burgundy glistening after a bout of spring rain, and that cool, damp clay koppie on your beloved Vriesenhof farm on Stellenboschberg.

“All the great wines of the world are dependent on the clay content of their vineyards’ soils,” you liked to say.

You were a farmer first. “Thing about Jan, is he’s crazy about soil,” said your friend Kevin Arnold to me a few years’ back. “After harvest, the whole of Stellenbosch is heading out to Hermanus or measuring samples in the cellar – but not Jan. He’s waist deep in some hole in a Vriesenhof vineyard checking the condition of his soils ahead of autumn.”

Having spent much time in France, particularly in your beloved Burgundy, you knew great winemakers have first to be good farmers.

“There they don’t even have a name for a winemaker,” you said, “it is a vigneron. Carer of the vineyard and the land. That’s our only true role.”

It was in France, you told me, that you truly found amazement at nature’s effect on plants. This was not in a vineyard in Burgundy or Bordeaux. But in Normandy, in Giverny where Claude Monet’s garden of light and colour and of inspiration lies. Inspiration you found there, too, upon visiting Monet’s garden during a rugby tour in the 1960s.

“I was amazed at the shrubs and flowers and trees, and the pond with its lilies, as I have always loved gardens and this one looked like it had been laid-out and nurtured by an angel,” you told me. “But what was truly fascinating, was that the flowers, the same flowers, showed different colours depending on where they were planted in the garden. And I remember thinking, that if nature can so dramatically influence the colours of these same flowers, what incredible effect must nature not have on the vineyard, the grapes and the wines we wish to make.”

That moment in Giverny was a moment forever stuck in your mind – which held millions of moments, as your memory was so very fine and clear – and also convinced you that wine farmers must strive for beauty in wine. And that it is nature which liest at the heart of beauty, in wine and very many other things in life, too. Especially the things that matter.

“There are no great wines,” you liked to say, “only great bottles.”

Wisdom is not sought or acquired, it befalls those blessed enough to deserve it. And we were honoured, privileged to have experienced your wisdom. You led, without commanding. Quietly inspiring others to seek the earth’s mysterious ways with vine and wine, and to – above all – remain in awe and wonder on this path the people of wine have chosen. Cherish it.

Last week during the Cape Wine event, on the very day you had passed, Gary Jordan told a gathering that every South African wine person in that huge, cavernous hall in Cape Town had been in some way influenced by Jan Boland Coetzee. This is true.

You led the real vinous revolution in South Africa when in the 1970s estate wines began being made, our country’s wines at last bearing a fingerprint of their geography, their expression of place. Those first Kanonkops you made – Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinotage from the 1973 vintage – bore the hallmarks of greatness, paving the way for the legend you were to become.

In 1980 you headed south of Stellenbosch, to Vriesenhof to make wine from Cabernet Sauvignon, a grape you always said was the region’s heart-beat. But then you spent a year in Burgundy in service of Maison Joseph Drouhin. Talking of those days, you laughed, saying the first thing you learnt there was how regularly your fellow French vignerons had to take a break to eat. You worked 600 tons of Burgundy grapes during the 1981 harvest, toured the vineyards of Chambertin, Musigny, Montrachet and Corton. Felt the soils there, and smelt them.

Like you always did of South African earth, you understood the earth of Burgundy and could feel its heartbeat in its wines you so loved. You spoke about them with awe.

Back in the Cape, you planted Chardonnay and then Pinot Noir, and the wines were clear and fine, and spoke the language of Stellenboschberg with a Burgundian lisp.

When you yourself spoke, people listened. For respecting you and your wisdom came naturally to us. We would hear about the great Cape vintages of years past. The reasons for the wines of Musigny today being lighter in structure than they were 40 years back. Why the sun’s differing radiation made Cabernet Sauvignon from Simonsberg lie quicker and drier on the tongue than the ones made on the south-facing slopes of Stellenboschberg.

Your voice was like the way honey goes when the sugar in it crystalises giving the sweetness a textured gritty edge. Everyone loved to listen to what you had to say, and everyone who did, remembers your words as much as they do the man behind them.

Your favourite wine-writer was a German: Terry Theise. You liked eggs over easy and laid that morning by the Vriesenhof hens. Before meals you would pray at the table, taking your guests’ hands, and I remember the firm pressing you’d give my hand as the saying of grace ended.

You loved the sea as much as the soil, and one day you alone caught over 300 snoek from a boat using a land-line. I watched you dive for crayfish in the icy waters off Lambert’s Bay wearing only a heavy cotton rugby-jersey for protection against the cold.

The mysteries of life and of wine fascinated you. Your last project, before your mind closed in and the light dimmed, was to find out whether the origins of Pinot Gris in New Zealand stemmed from Napoleon Bonaparte’s incarceration on St Helena.

You told me there were records of Napoleon having Pinot Noir vine-cuttings shipped to St Helena from Burgundy. As Pinot Gris was grown in Burgundy at that time, these ended up in Napoleon’s stash, and after some British ship heading for New Zealand had picked-up the vines, they were planted in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

You would have died wondering about this, and about the very many other facets of wine and the world; about people and life and history that always fascinated you, kept your thoughts alive on those dark starry spring nights when the cool southerly breeze kicked up, blowing briskly over Stellenboschberg. You loved that world, as well as many other parts of this earth, and now you have been returned to it where, and of this I am sure, you are just as welcome and beloved as you were in the days of walking upon it.

Probably not knowing that now, in your absence, those footsteps and the prints they left, are eternal.