When a Vineyard Dies

He leans with his back on the car’s bonnet, and begins to take off his shoes. “I need to feel the soil,” he said, “and I need to know if the roots are happy.”

Brenwyn Arends and I are next to a vineyard near the False Bay coast outside Stellenbosch, and of the three of us, the vineyard is the oldest. But in a few months from now – God willing – only myself and Brenwyn will still be here, as this old Chenin Blanc vineyard is to be removed during winter, once the drenching Cape rains have arrived and loosened up the soil between these old dryland vines.

He puts his scuffed brown shoes and thin black socks on the floor of the passenger-seat and closes the door. And begins to walk, barefooit, into a row of short bush-vines. He turns around and smiles at me, the mouth short a few teeth, but the smile warm and wide and loving. “It feels nice to be back home.”

The vineyard was, he had told me earlier, home to Brenwyn for over 45 years. He had always lived with 11 other families as a farm-worker on the farm, before being moved to a house in Macassar ten years ago, a month short of his 60^th birthday.

I walk over to where Brenwyn is crouching at a low bush-vine, stroking the leaves, then tapping on the thick, knotted grey-black scion with his bony, wrinkled brown fingers.

“See the leaves,” he says, looking up at me and squinting at the sun above us. “They going rust-coloured early, not because of the virus or stuff like that, but because the vines must have carried heavy grapes this season.” He looks down at the bush-vine running his hands along the shoots, stopping at the points where the bunches had been picked this year, picked for the very last time.

“I haven’t been in this vineyard for six, seven years, but I can tell it was a big harvest this year and the vines carried heavy grapes, worked hard, perhaps six, eight tons a hectare,” he says. “It’s the leaves, see, the green sucked out by the work of ripening so much fruit, and I can feel, in me, the vines are tired, spent.” He stands up and I hear the joints cracking in his knees.

“So, the last harvest was a big one,” says Brenwyn and turns to look further down the row. “Probably a good way for a vineyard to go out, with a big last harvest.”

I walk next to him along the row of Chenin Blanc vines lined in the direction of the Helderberg. The first signs of autumn have pulled the sharpness from the sun, giving the sky a softer hue. The din of traffic in the distance can be heard. My boots crunch on the gravel soil, Brenwyn’s feet are silent in their bareness.

“Ja, some of the best times in my life were spent in this vineyard, and some of the hardest,” he says, his dark eyes restless, looking over the spread of vines, large circular saucers in their perfect natural patterns. “No, it was never Chenin Blanc, it was Steen – still is for me. When I started working here in 1978, the grapes went to the co-op. Then later, about 20 years ago, the farmer began selling to some winemakers. This is when things got all fancy, with these winemakers. Before, when it went to the co-op, we workers of the vineyards were also the farmers. We knew when to prune, to feed some fertilizer, break leaves, when to begin picking.

“But then the winemakers from outside came in with their viticulturist-things and really started bossing us around with stuff like green harvesting and planting weeds they call cover-crops and spraying some medicine over the vines just after flowering.”

Brenwyn stops in the middle of the long row of bushvines. “I can’t believe that next time this year, this will all be bare soil and the vines that are living here now, after all these years, will have been turned to firewood.” He shakes his head. “Makes me glad I don’t live on the farm anymore, but somewhere away from it where I won’t have to see the graveyard.”

He says he liked the pruning time best. “The winter winds would remind me how close this vineyard is to the sea, you’d smell shells and salt in the air,” he says. “It was cold, but pruning kept me warm, I was a quick one, easily cutting 800 vines a day.” Brenwyn drops to his haunches, takes a vine-shoot and makes a snipping morion with fore- and middle-finer. “Quick-quick, then get up and move to the next one. If you are young, it’s not tough on the back, but I did get slower in my 50s.”

We walk in silence, see a hawk drifting in the still azure sky. Brenwyn says harvest-time was also a good time. “I’ve always liked being a part of things that grow,” he murmurs. “Seeing the green shoots popping out in September, and the vine growing through spring and summer and making bunches with those gold-and-green berries, and tasting the sweet berries, this is a miracle.”

He puts his hands on his sides and looks at the sky. “It, the vines, these are miracles. I was ever only a farm-worker, a poor man. I now life off a Sassa grant. But I can say that once I worked with a miracle of nature.” He turns to me. “How many can say they worked with miracles?” He extends an arm and points his hand over the vines. “That’s what I have now, the memories of miracles, and it makes me feel almost rich.”

At harvest time, Brenwyn could pick one ton of grapes a day – 60 of those traditional thatched-reed ballas-mandjies. As an older man, he got to drive the load to the co-op. “There I smelled the grapes turning into wine. It smelled sour.”

I ask him if he likes wine. He shakes his head.

“Too much trouble,” he says. “When I was a young man, I’d – like the other workers – do anything for a bottle or papsak of wine, it made me strong then, and happy and funny. But it also made me forget what I was doing. And what I was doing to other people. So I have not touched wine for over 30 years.”

Looking down at his bare-feet, now covered with light grey dust, I ask him what he feels. He looks at the soil, the layer of gravel interspersed with runs of russet oakleaf.

“The roots are deep, so it is not always easy to hear what they say,” says Brenwyn, now lightly stomping his one bare foot on the earth. “But I feel they are resting, and they are tired, and – if I use my imagination – I feel they are happy in knowing they have given their all in this time they have been alive.”

He drops to his haunches and strokes the leaves of a vine with a particularly thick trunk.

“I think they are ready to go,” he says.