An Aroma of Life

Smell is the sense that gets to you first and leaves last. It sidesteps reason, memory and good manners and goes straight for the jugular. There are a handful of smells that reliably undo me. The Cape’s cold Atlantic air, salted and metallic, with ghostly traces of mussel shell and feral female mating instrument. A Karoo dirt road after the first drops of rain, dust briefly remembering it was once alive. A dachshund puppy, improbably exhaling the comforting aroma of sweet coffee, as if it’s already lived a better life than you have.

Seeing may be believing, but smelling is understanding. It delivers, without argument, the overwhelming splendour of being alive.

And now it is harvest in the Cape winelands. As I write, the Boland sits under a sky of impossible, almost vulgar blue, while the air is thick with the unmistakable scent of grapes at the moment of their demise. Fruit born in September, pushed out with the vine’s first green optimism, which then spent the long, hot summer pulling sugar, juice and ripeness from sun and soil alike, has been cut down. Berries severed from stems. One life ends so that another, more interesting one, may begin.

This is where wine is born: sweet, sticky juice sluicing into tanks, barrels and – these days – concrete eggs and clay vessels, because winemakers are nothing if not romantics with spreadsheets. Here, nature performs its most persuasive sleight of hand, eating sugar and excreting alcohol. Innocent, cosseted vineyard fruit is converted into something worldly, adult and faintly dangerous.

The smell is irresistible. Drive with the window open between Stellenbosch and Wellington and the vapours of fermenting grape juice roll into the car like an invisible tide. You don’t merely look at the vineyard landscape, postcard-perfect as it is; you absorb it. It seeps into your chest. And if you care about wine at all, you become uncomfortably aware that it shares something with you. A temperament, perhaps. Or a soul, if you’re prepared to forgive the indulgence.

Winemakers are among my favourite people. Not just for their easy unforced hospitality and their alarming tolerance for long lunches, but because they are, quite plainly, magicians. Alchemists with dirt under their nails. They take offerings from vine and earth and turn them into bottled miracles that millions of people quite reasonably regard as one of life’s great consolations.

To them, much of this is routine. To the rest of us, it remains a small miracle. And wine should always retain that sense of wonder; the moment it becomes a rattled-off commodity, it has already failed.

Consider the business of skin contact in red wine: the punch-downs and pump-overs, acts of gentle violence essential to the final result. I can happily sit for hours beside Kanonkop’s open concrete tanks, watching a heaving mass of Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinotage skins – purple-black, brooding, faintly menacing – floating atop the fermenting juice. Tiny bubbles fizz up through the crust like burping angels. Every couple of hours, someone arrives wielding a pole with a flat board attached and forces the skins down into the liquid. When they rise again, slick with ink-dark juice, they glitter like black stars hauled briefly from the deep.

The smell at this point is not shy. It’s profound and engulfing: sweet fruit, sharp acidity, a sudden aromatic bloom that hangs heavily in the cellar air, as if gravity has briefly been suspended.

This is how red wine comes into existence. Colour leached from skins. Tannin extracted to give grip, persistence and seriousness. Mouthfeel, weight and structure quietly negotiated. That something so apparently crude – pushing skins through juice – can dictate the fate of a wine remains one of the great quiet marvels.

Then there is the barrel. Oak trees grown for nearly two centuries in French forests before being felled without ceremony. The wood is sawn into staves and left outside for years, enduring sun and frost until its raw greenness is beaten out of it by weather and time. Only then do craftsmen, broad-shouldered, taciturn, unimpressed by theory, coax the staves into barrels. Handsome things the barrels are, with reassuringly sensual curves and the air of holding opinions.

Back in the Cape, Chardonnay juice is poured into these barrels and left to ferment in darkness, unseen and unbothered. For a year the wine sulks, settles, stretches its limbs. At first, vineyard and oak may bristle at one another. But they learn. They compromise.

The barrel guards the wine’s citrus, nut and floral notes with almost jealous care, preserving the vineyard’s sense of place: its terroir, that word people pretend to understand. And in return, the wood offers texture, depth and quiet complexity, lending the wine a sense of gravitas without bullying it.

All of this unfolds under the watchful, opinionated eye of the winemaker, whose senses are as important as any instrument. To witness it, to drink the result, is not merely pleasurable. It is a privilege. One shared from human to human, with nature and culture in between.