For a lover of wine, there are few pleasures greater than witnessing the astonishment, delight and gratitude that spread across a fellow enthusiast’s face when one surprises them with an exceptional bottle. Not merely something pleasant, agreeable or well made. I speak of the celestial. The spellbinding. The improbable. Something that makes the recipient understand that your gift, and the joy it offers, is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, an experience granted to very few among the living.

And so it was with the bottle of Madeira I finally managed to place into my hands and to offer to my dear friend, De Witt.

When it comes to wine, the image of Madeira has long suffered from memories of the cheap, sweetened concoctions that, decades ago, were produced and sold under that name in places such as South Africa and Australia. That ill-mannered appropriation of the name has largely faded, and today most wines bearing the Madeira label originate from the Portuguese island of Madeira itself, where this singular wine has been crafted for centuries. In our time, Madeira ranks among the rarest and most costly wines on earth.

There are three reasons for this. First, the tiny island of Madeira supports only some 200 hectares of vineyard, a minute primary resource. Then there is the feature that makes Madeira so uniquely itself: it can, in essence, age forever in bottle. The explanation lies in the wine’s extraordinary treatment after fortification. In large casks, high in the lodges, the maturing wine is exposed to heat for years — warmed by the sun — which concentrates flavour and induces a benign oxidation, protecting the wine from the slow, ruinous oxygen that otherwise seeps through cork over time.

The third reason for Madeira’s desirability is simply this: a fine Madeira is among the most wondrous and magical wines on earth. Nothing truly compares. Whether at the dry end fashioned from Sercial grapes, or at the richly sweet extreme of Malmsey, an aged Madeira offers an aromatic and flavour experience of rare profundity. (Incidentally, Malmsey Madeira is made from the Malvasia grape, from which our beloved Malva pudding takes its name.)

But to return to De Witt and the Madeira. Through the intricate channels of a Portuguese friend’s brother’s cousin’s grandmother’s brother-in-law, I tracked down a bottle of Madeira made in 1899 — one hundred and twenty-seven years ago. That precise vintage mattered greatly, for De Witt harbours a deep passion for all matters relating to the Anglo-Boer War, and, as even I know, the first shots of that conflict were fired in 1899, the very year the grapes for this Madeira were pressed on the island.

I had to get a bottle of wine from that year, to taste it with De Witt, to witness his joy at consuming a wine made in the very same year of at which his – can one say beloved? – Boer War began.

The bottle was finally imported late last year from the island via a winemaking acquaintance who owed me a favour. At first, I intended to present it to De Witt as a Christmas gift, but since he was away on his annual ski holiday in Italy at the time, I was forced to wait.

And so April arrived, and I arranged to meet him “for a drink”, which duly took place the other day. To ensure the 1899 treasure remained in respectable condition, I took the bottle to a Portuguese cork importer. Manuel carefully drew the ancient cork and poured a teaspoon of the wine into a glass. We nosed it, then touched it cautiously to the tongue. Phenomenal. Heavenly. Already I could picture De Witt’s expression, that stunned, reverent appreciation reserved for rare jewels of the vine.

Manuel replaced the crumbling century-old cork with a fresh one, and two days later I arrived early in the afternoon at De Witt’s residence in Durbanville. The housekeeper, Bernice, has known me for years and understands that I never arrive there empty-handed. Mr De Witt was working in his office next to the house, but, Bernice said, I could wait in the sitting room, she would make tea.

No, that was quite all right, I replied, and walked to De Witt’s imposing yellowwood drinks cabinet. I found a glass decanter among the cognac and whisky bottles, drew the cork from my 1899 Madeira and poured the wine into the vessel. I wanted De Witt to taste the wine without knowing what it was and, once he had delivered his verdict, to astonish him with the empty antique bottle bearing the words “Madeira Terrantez 1899”. For the moment of revelation, I hid the empty bottle behind the cabinet.

The aroma of the Madeira flowed from the decanter and drifted through the entire sitting room. The wine gleamed with the colour of gold burnished in the fire of pleasure. I set the decanter carefully down on the cabinet, and just then my mobile phone rang. De Witt asked me to come to his office, as Bernice had made tea and we could chat briefly before he finished his work.

In his spacious office, filled with books — most of them on the Boer War — and memorabilia such as old French newspapers bearing the faces of Boer generals on their front pages, we spoke briefly about the recent grape harvest. He also told me, with evident delight, that his dear wife, Karetha, had finally begun taking an interest in wine. She and her book-club friends were, at that very moment, tasting wines at the Diemersdal estate just around the corner.

De Witt tapped at his keyboard, and the sound of the printer announced the fall of fresh sheets of paper. He rose, collected the pages and asked me to read the report he had written on the international citrus market, in which his business operates.

It was a good report, as always, and I suggested a few minor adjustments of grammar, but nothing serious. In my mind, however, I was already imagining how De Witt would react to the Madeira: 1899 — a wine neither of us would likely encounter again in our lifetimes.

At last he snapped his laptop shut. “Right, now I rather fancy a nip,” he said, rising to his feet. As we walked through the kitchen, I heard women’s voices somewhere beyond, followed by a burst of laughter: Karetha and her entourage had evidently returned from their wine tasting, and it sounded as though the session had been a success.

I told De Witt that I had brought something along for us to taste, and he replied that he simply could not wait.

We stepped into the sitting room, only to find it filled with women in colourful attire, chatting and laughing, perhaps twelve or thirteen of them.

“Hello, you two boys!” said Karetha, raising the glass from which she was drinking in our direction. “Whoever opened that sweet wine, good going old chap! After tasting Sauvignon Blanc all day, a little something sweet really does the trick.”

And then I saw that the ladies reclining comfortably on the long sofas and generous armchairs held glasses that were nearly empty. Nearly as empty as the decanter in which De Witt’s 1899 Madeira had so recently rested.

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.

There is a temptation to butter things up about my current state of dietary affairs, but to hell with that. It has now been nearly two months since it was taken from me, and with another 30 days still to go, I am beginning to doubt my perseverance, stamina and persistence when it comes to surviving without the blessing of a daily piece of bread.

Here’s the story: a simple blood test, a medical consultation, and the cool, authoritative voice of science decreed that, as far as my eating habits are concerned, I should for three months avoid anything containing flour and starch. What began two months ago as an adjusted lifestyle, embraced with bright-eyed enthusiasm and a rather admirable sense of self-discipline, has gradually given way to an irritable hollowness, the jarred, jagged emotions stirred by that quietly gnawing realisation that something in life is missing. Self-diagnosis, assisted by a cursory trawl through a few psychological tomes, has concluded that the world shall all be well again if I could simply get my hands on a piece of warm, crusty, bread.

This craving for something that, prior to that wretched medical diagnosis, was considered entirely ordinary, is taking on rather alarming forms. First, there are the physical symptoms, none of which the medical consultant had the decency to warn me about when proposing this (temporary) breadless existence.

Take two weekends ago, for instance. I find myself in the winged temple of baking that is Knysna’s Île de Pain, in search of a takeaway coffee. With commendable self-restraint, I sidestepped the colourful tarts, biscuits, and chocolate éclairs parading along the counter. But just as my coffee was set down, a staff member deposited an armful of long, slender French loaves – fresh from the oven – onto a nearby shelf. That warm, enveloping aroma of bread, that promise of comfort and fulfilment, coupled with the sight of those golden-brown, crackling baguette crusts, sent my heart into such an unseemly gallop that my coffee hand began to tremble. I even had to decline, with what dignity I could muster, the waiter’s kindly suggestion that I might prefer to sit down somewhere.

Then there are the public displays of tears that afflict the bread-deprived. At a business breakfast, a female banker sits opposite me, slowly and deliberately spreading fresh butter the colour of sunflowers onto a thick slice of sourdough. The craving, combined with memories of my mother’s daily bread-baking and my grandmother’s heroic churning of butter, caused my eyes to well up so profusely that my contact lenses very nearly slipped into my bowl of low-fat yoghurt.

Yet it is the emotional damage of a breadless life that cuts the deepest.

There are nightmares. Such as the one in which two slices of toast, lavishly spread with butter and Bovril and crowned with slices of perfectly ripe orange Cheddar, are placed before you. Just as you reach out to claim that first, soothing bite, the sandwich transforms into a large, cold, green stick of celery. It is harrowing. You wake in a cold sweat, awash with anxiety and grief.

Then there is the dream of the physician who started it all, calmly informing you that the latest report indicates that the three breadless months must, regrettably, now be extended to at least two years. But in this dream, you do not even wake.

Cast your bread upon the waters if you must, doctor: Come day thirty, I shall be piling mine high again, and with feeling and with relish.

Barely days after re-writing South Africa’s history narrative by claiming the sea-route around the Cape had long been established before Jan van Riebeeck landed at the foot-end of Africa in 1652, the nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is set to offer a new chapter on the country’s much vaunted wine history. In an exclusive memo leaked to winegoggle.co.za, government officials say the ANC hopes to release its findings on the true origins of the country’s wine industry before this year’s municipal elections.

Winegoggle was contacted by an unnamed official from the ANC’s department of colonial verification to disclose further information, the official going only by the initials GY. The exclusive interview with GY went as follows:

Wine Goggle (WG): Why release this groundbreaking information on South Africa’s wine industry only now?

GY: The ANC is losing seats and votes in rural wineland communities, and by offering an alternative interpretation of the history of South African wine the party hopes to draw in new voters and win over former ones by making them feel a greater part of the wine world. Give these rural communities true agency in the wine industry through a visceral historical connection championed and revealed by the ANC, and it’s ANC voting all the way. Also, as a student of history, Comrade Ramaphosa’s copious research always leads to the uncovering of new facts which he deems a responsibility to share with the nation.

WG: So what is this new information on Cape wine history?

GY: Pres. Ramaphosa will dismiss the current narrative claiming wine was made for the first time in South Africa under the auspices of commander Jan van Riebeeck who noted the maiden Cape grapes for wine were pressed on 2 February 1659. In fact, wine grapes had been grown on what is today known as the Cape Flats since at least 1242.

WG: Where and by whom?

GY: The Khoisan people cultivated vines on the sandy Cape Flats soils, especially in the southern areas of what is today known as Bonteheuwel and Pelican Park. Excellent terroir – superbly drained soils and cooling southerly breezes. This allowed the Khoisan to tend their vines, while also heading to the False Bay coast for fishing-purposes outside of the harvest and pruning seasons.

WG: Did they have wine-cellars?

GY: Not the colonial white people cellars most are familiar with. Wine was fermented in open-air amphorae set under canopies made from antelope and buffalo hide, a truly sustainable natural environment the likes of which are not found in today’s technological commercial wineries. All wine was naturally fermented without going through malolactic fermentation. Barrel-aging on red grapes was done in the hollowed-out trunks of Cape yellow-wood trees, and for a minimum of nine months.

WG: Which grape varieties were vinified?

GY: As per Comrade Ramaphosa’s analysis, the concept of different “grape cultivars” is a colonial restriction devised to divide the democratic offering of nature by creating singularly exclusive identities. There were only white grapes and red grapes, as there should be, and rosé was a blend of the two to underscore the importance of true inclusivity.

WG: What did these early winemakers do with their wine?

GY: There was trading, of course. As Tariq Mellet states in his book “The Lie of 1652” – and to repeat Comrade Ramaphosa’s recent enlightening analysis on the pre-colonial sea-routes around the Cape – this place was visited by ships from various countries long before Jan van Riebeeck and his gang set foot here. The Khoisan were trading their excellent wines with fleets from various nationalities, providing sustenance and joy to weary sailors. Being hospitable and welcoming, the locals also presented food and wine evenings on the ships, helping to promote Brand South African Wine as far back as the 13^th century!

The local people of that time also, as was their right, consumed much wine between themselves, thus ensuring a true wine culture was already in existence long before the settlers of 1652 arrived.

WG: We would like to believe that pres. Ramaphosa and the ANC have proof of this pre-colonial wine industry?

GY: The demand for evidence is not neutral. It never was. When the Western historian raises his hand and calls for proof, he is not appealing to reason — he is appealing to power. He is invoking a methodology born in the same universities that trained colonial administrators, the same academies that catalogued African peoples as specimens, the same intellectual tradition that produced the “scientific” justifications for our subjugation.

To demand that the African scholar submit his history for validation by the Western academy is to demand that he return to the master’s house and beg for his own birth certificate.

What they call “evidence” is a gatekeeping function. The archive was built by those who controlled what was recorded, what was burned, what was stolen. The footnote is a colonial instrument. The peer-reviewed journal — with its overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Western editorial boards — is not a neutral arbiter of truth. It is a border checkpoint, and we did not build that border.

African knowledge lives in the griot’s song, in ceremony, in oral transmission across generations. It lives in the body. This does not make it lesser. It makes it ours — unsanitised by the coloniser’s need to categorise, to contain, to own.

The colonised mind accepts the oppressor’s epistemology as universal. The liberated mind understands that the question “where is your evidence?” already contains within it the assumption that only one way of knowing counts.

We refuse that assumption. We begin there.

WG: Are there no remains of the Khoisan wineries of those Cape Flats vineyards?

GY: The Dutch colonisers approached the Khoisan wine-farmers for a joint venture, but there were disputes about where the new Khoi-Cape Wine Company was going to have their tasting room – the Dutch wanted Constantia, the Khoi wanted Bonteheuwel. There were also differences about offering the wines for the Platter’s Wine Guide and Tim Atkin’s annual report, so there was a little war, the Dutch guns won as the Khoisan fled, leaving the Cape Flats vineyards unattended. They withered, covered by metres of sand.

Although France today stands as the Holy Grail of the wine world, it was outsiders who first planted vine roots in French soil. This was more than 2 000 years ago, when those pesky Romans were busy with their frenetic campaigns of occupation, the legions carrying vine cuttings with them and planting vineyards wherever a patch of foreign earth had been conquered.

South Africans may not be Roman conquerors, yet anyone exposed to the local media cannot fail to notice how besotted my compatriots have become with all things French over the past two decades. And it is not merely a matter of flying from Gauteng to Paris for two weeks to gaze at the Eiffel Tower, wander through the Louvre and chomp on baguettes laden with Camembert and Roquefort. No. South Africans are settling in France by the thousands. They play rugby, work across a spectrum of businesses, buy rural guesthouses and hotels, or keep a second home tucked away in Normandy or Provence.

There appears, particularly among Afrikaans speakers, to be an alluring bridge between South Africa and France — as though elements of the French landscape, culture and spirit speak more directly to South Africans than the grey Germanic stretches of Europe or the studied neutrality of Australia and America.

So hearing that two Afrikaners were living in the French countryside of Bergerac, alongside the famous Bordeaux wine region, was hardly unusual news. Discovering that they were making wine on their own estate pricked the interest a little more, although they are by no means the only ones doing so. But when I dug a little deeper and found out that Petrie and Jaco Terblanche were planting Pinotage on their French property, that is when the lights really came on.

Because that is what Boere do: they make a plan. And just as the Romans once planted their own vineyards on French soil, so South African ingenuity, loyalty and a taste for adventure are now being harnessed to add something new to the French wine scene. Next month, when the European spring begins to stir, one-and-a-half hectares of Pinotage will be planted on Jaco and Petrie’s farm, Château Lestevenie, which they have owned since 2022.

“With our South African roots, Pinotage has always been part of our story,” says Petrie. “After all, it is South Africa’s own grape — born from a unique crossing and deeply woven into the country’s wine identity. And although France is our home — we’ve lived here since 2015 — we remain deeply attached to our identity as South Africans. Just as Pinotage is a ‘South African’ grape variety forever linked to that country, we too are French citizens now, but with indelible roots at the southern tip of Africa. We see Pinotage as a bridge between our new home and our homeland.”

When they acquired Château Lestevenie it was already an established wine estate in the Bergerac region of south-western France, an area best known for Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot on the red side, and Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon for whites. Although both Petrie and Jaco grew up on farms — in Riversdale and Clanwilliam respectively — winemaking does not run through their veins. Before Lestevenie, Petrie worked in financial investments in the United States before being transferred to Paris in 2015, while Jaco still works as an embryologist for a Swedish company, operating from his computer on the farm. Before France he was based in London. They are married and have eight-year-old twins, Nico and Emma.

“Although our move to Château Lestevenie was largely driven by a desire to escape the bustle of Paris and to create a lifestyle destination in the French countryside, we knew from the outset that wine and vineyards would always be the heart of Lestevenie,” says Jaco.

“So we did our homework properly, bringing in local consultants to help with the vineyards and appointing a vineyard and viticulture manager. But Petrie and I are fully involved in the process. What we know now about wine and vines compared to when we arrived here in 2022 is worlds apart. We approached everything very practically: reading, learning, rolling up our sleeves and working alongside local experts. Labour is scarce in France and it’s expensive, so when hands are needed, they are usually our own.”

Although there are a few small patches of Pinotage vineyards in France, the grape barely registers on that country’s planting radar.

“Pinotage in France is almost unthinkable,” says Petrie. “It’s a grape people associate with South African sunshine, red soils and braaivleis — not with French limestone hills. And that’s precisely why the idea gripped us. For us it wasn’t just a wine project, but a symbolic bridge between our past and our new home.

“We wanted to plant a story — literally. A vineyard connecting our South African heritage with the French terroir of Bergerac. After all, we are Terblanches whose ancestors left for South Africa in the seventeenth century.”

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the French attachment to bureaucracy — particularly when it concerns their proudest industry, wine — will know that planting a new grape variety in a region can be about as challenging as mastering the permutations of French verbs.

Petrie smiles. “Yes, it certainly wasn’t simple,” he says. “Bringing Pinotage to France required plenty of administration and cooperation, as well as a bit of daring. But eventually a forward-thinking nursery near Saint-Émilion in the Bordeaux region agreed to take the adventure on with us. They had never worked with Pinotage before and openly admitted they had no idea how the grape would respond to French soil. But the French also know that the best stories begin with a leap of faith.”

Around 9 000 cuttings were eventually grafted onto suitable rootstocks to produce some 6 000 vines — enough to plant one-and-a-half hectares of vineyard. The soils at Château Lestevenie consist mainly of limestone and clay. Bergerac’s climate bears many similarities to that of neighbouring Bordeaux, although its more inland position brings colder winters and warmer summers.

“Of course we are burning with curiosity to see how the Pinotage vines will take to life here in France — not to mention the first grapes and wines in four or five years’ time,” says Jaco. “If you look at where Pinotage grows in South Africa, from the warm regions of Worcester and Robertson to the cool Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, the grape appears remarkably adaptable. So we’re hopeful it will show its true colours here in Bergerac too. After all, it’s a South African grape — and adaptability is part of the ethos of anything South African.”

Interest in Château Lestevenie’s Pinotage project has been overwhelming.

“The nursery that propagated our vines and the local wine community here are almost as excited about the Pinotage as we are,” says Petrie. “And then there’s the Pinotage Association, whose number we can dial whenever we need advice. The other day we were at Diemersdal in Durbanville, where Thys Louw makes award-winning Pinotage, and when he heard about our project, he immediately said he felt like coming over to help with the planting. That’s the wonderful thing about the global wine community — the enthusiasm, the curiosity and the willingness to share knowledge.”

Since acquiring Château Lestevenie, Petrie and Jaco have also begun transforming the property into a lively tourism destination.

“There’s a strong focus on wine tourism,” says Jaco. “We want to share the farm and the region with visitors. We offer wine tastings, vineyard tours and food-and-wine experiences, and we also host spirited soirées and special functions on the estate. In the future we plan to develop luxury accommodation so that guests can truly feel part of life on the farm.”

And with a glass of Château Lestevenie Pinotage in hand and a thick duck breast sizzling over the coals, those guests will not only be part of the story — they will feel right at home.

There are wines that ask to be drunk, and wines that ask to be understood. Lady May — Glenelly Estate’s great Bordeaux blend, born from the slopes of the Simonsberg and the singular conviction of one woman — belongs emphatically to the second category. It demands something of you. It rewards the effort.

For forty years and more, the conversation about Stellenbosch’s finest reds has been a dialogue between two voices: Meerlust Rubicon, brooding and monumental, granite-dark, built for the long sleep of cellarage; and Kanonkop Paul Sauer, sumptuously cedary, generous with its fruit, the very image of Cape opulence at its most composed. These are wines of genuine stature, wines that have carried South Africa’s flag into the fiercest international company. They have earned every syllable of their reputation.

But pantheons are not closed systems. They expand, when the evidence compels expansion. And the evidence, now, compels it.

May-Eliane de Lencquesaing, for decades the presiding intelligence behind Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, one of the Médoc’s most celebrated second growths, arrived in Stellenbosch in 2003 with the particular clarity of someone who knows precisely what great wine requires and is not afraid to pursue it across hemispheres. Her acquisition of Glenelly was not the retirement project of a tired Bordelaise aristocrat seeking winter sun. It was a wager: that this valley, these soils, this light, could produce something genuinely worthy of comparison with the finest that Europe had given her.

Eighteen vintages of Lady May on, the wager has been paid in full, with interest.

The architecture of Lady May is Bordelaise in inspiration, yet it would be a mistake to call it imitative. Imitation is what a lesser estate might attempt, the anxious mimicry of received models, the result being a wine that feels translated rather than spoken. Lady May does not translate. It thinks in its own language, even if the grammar was learned in the Médoc.

Cabernet Sauvignon anchors the blend, as it must on Stellenbosch’s better slopes, where the variety finds the structural authority that is its birthright. But the supporting ensemble tells a subtler story. Merlot brings warmth and amplitude without softening it into mere approachability. Petit Verdot contributes something harder to name: a verticality, a faint violet lift, a reminder that complexity in wine is rarely the achievement of a single variety acting alone. And Cabernet Franc — that most aristocratic of the blending grapes — threads through the whole with its distinctive herbal whisper and a texture of extraordinary fineness.

The proportions shift with each vintage, as they should. Wine is not a recipe. It is a response to what the year has offered, and the winemaker’s task is to listen carefully enough to respond with intelligence. What remains constant in Lady May, across the variations of season and climate, is seamlessness: the sense that what you are tasting is a single, indivisible thing rather than an assembly of parts. This is rarer than it sounds. Many blends, however accomplished, retain a certain seam-visibility, a point at which you can feel the join. Lady May does not.

There is a trap that awaits red winemakers in warm climates, and it is a seductive one: the trap of amplitude. The sun gives generously here; the grapes ripen with an ease that cooler regions can only envy; and the temptation, when making a wine intended to be serious and age-worthy, is to push towards concentration, towards extraction, towards a kind of vinous monumentalism that mistakes weight for substance.

Lady May has consistently refused this temptation. The wine is substantial, but its substance is of the kind that moves lightly. The tannins are firm and present, providing the scaffolding that decades of cellaring will require, yet they carry none of the aggression that mars so many ambitious reds from warm climates. The fruit — dark, layered, carrying suggestions of cedar and graphite alongside the more obvious berry registers — never tips towards the jammy or the overripe. And beneath everything, sustaining the whole with the quiet insistence of a ground bass, runs a freshness that keeps bringing you back to the glass.

This freshness is the gift of the Simonsberg terroir: those decomposed granite soils, the cooling maritime influences that temper the Cape’s fiercer tendencies, the altitude and aspect that allow ripeness to accumulate gradually rather than arrive all at once. The mountain does not merely provide a backdrop for the wine. It shapes its character at the deepest level.

Lady May is not Rubicon. It does not seek Rubicon’s particular darkness, its almost geological patience, its sense of having been assembled for an encounter decades hence. Nor is it Paul Sauer, that wine’s plushness and cedar-box generosity a different kind of pleasure entirely. Lady May is more fleet of foot than the first, more structurally exacting than the second. It has found its own place in the spectrum of Cape greatness, and it occupies that place with an assurance that speaks of long thought and mature execution.

What strikes me, returning to this wine over several vintages, is the constancy of its ambition and the consistency with which that ambition is realised. Great wine regions are defined not by their best individual bottles but by the sustained achievement of their finest producers: the ability to deliver excellence not once, not occasionally, but reliably, across the vicissitudes of seasons that no one can control. This is what Rubicon and Paul Sauer demonstrated over their decades of pre-eminence, and it is what Lady May has now demonstrated in its own right.

Stellenbosch did not need a third great red wine. Greatness is not a quota to be filled. But when it arrives — unmistakable, on its own terms, with its own voice — the only honest response is acknowledgement. The pantheon, which was always a conversation rather than a closed list, now has a third voice. It is richer for the addition.

The winery sits high on the slopes of Stellenbosch’s Simonsberg, facing south-west toward the distant presence of Table Mountain, its outline framed between rows of green vineyard leaves. Autumn has arrived here. Almost.

In the west the sun is sinking fast, though a veil of thin cloud robs the mountain farm of the flamboyant theatre of sunset for which these hills are known. The light has already begun to thin into dusk. I am walking back to the deserted parking area after a conversation with the winemaker, who is now busy locking up the cellar for the night.

Weathered granite gravel crunches under my boots. (RM Williams, seeing you asked.) The wild-green scent of fynbos, sharpened by the falling temperature of day-end, hangs heavily in the air – herbal, earthy, breathing of soil and root, and vine. The Boland, yes. But Africa too.

Just before I reach the car, something compels me to turn around and look at the rows of Chardonnay climbing the higher slopes toward the Simonsberg. Sometimes you can look at a beautiful vineyard and taste the wine wine right there and then.

It is a strangely enriching feeling, at over sixty years of age, to find oneself in a situation never before experienced, something entirely new that suddenly unfolds before you.

Because standing there, before me, is a leopard.

The animal is not far away among the vines, barely offering me a fleeting glimpse of its presence here in the Boland. No. This leopard stands between me and those vineyards, right there on the bare patch of gravel.

And it is looking straight into my eyes.

In a feeble attempt at humour I try to count how many glasses of Chardonnay the winemaker and I tasted during our earlier discussion. Only two half-glasses, which unfortunately eliminates the possibility of a wine-induced leopard illusion. I think of my darling writer-mensch Herman Charles Bosman and his leopard story “In the Withaak’s Shade”. Should I channel my inner Oom Schalk and lie down, only to wake with the leopard sleeping soundly next to me?

Seconds pass here on the Simonsberg. The leopard remains perfectly still, staring. At moi. I notice how dramatically black the rosettes on its coat appear in the pale evening light. And how broad the jaw is beneath those eyes – deep pools holding things I do not know, and never will.

Suddenly I wish I were a bushveld boy, one of those field-wise men who would know exactly what to do in such a moment. Chase the cat away with a sweep of the arm. Perhaps shout a curse in some African tongue that would make the leopard turn and vanish instantly, as I have always heard a leopard can.

But if I were this leopard, I would know that a town fellow wandering around the gentle fields of the Boland is easy, vulnerable prey.

The intoxicated feeling of disbelief and wonder suddenly shifts into a surge of electric panic when the leopard closes its eyes and lifts its head slightly, like a gourmand preparing for the first taste of the season’s waterblommetjie stew.

That is when I hear my own heartbeat.

I try to turn my neck to see how far the car is behind me, but everything has turned to jelly. Literally. So I do the only thing left to do.

Like the leopard, I close my eyes.

And breathe.

When I look again, it is gone. Something moves through the vineyards, but it is unseen.

There were paw-prints. I kneel to touch the prints, etched in the wineland granite. The earth is, again, as warm as my heart.

There’s a moment every year in the Cape winelands when the first Sauvignon Blanc of the new vintage hits the bottle. It’s a bit like the maiden oyster of the season or that first cold beer after a long, brutal day in the kitchen — a signal that the waiting is over. And as in the past few years it’s been Diemersdal who have blessed us with the first market-ready Sauvignon Blanc of the year.

Barely a month after the first grapes were lovingly removed from the vines by regenerative mechanical harvester, the Diemersdal Sauvignon Blanc 2026 was already bottled, labelled and out in the wild. This kind of turnaround isn’t just impressive; it’s borderline reckless unless you really know what you’re doing.

Fortunately, the guy calling the shots does.

Thys Louw has been making Sauvignon Blanc here long enough to know exactly where the line is between speed and stupidity. And every year he seems to dance along it with the confidence of someone who understands both his vineyards and the thirst of the people waiting for the wine.

“As owners of an established brand, we’re fortunate that people are already asking for the new vintage by the end of January,” Louw says. But the truth is, you can’t rush wine unless the vineyards are already doing most of the work. And at Diemersdal, they are.

The Sauvignon Blanc vines here are dryland-farmed, as in no irrigation, no safety net. They survive on whatever winter rain and stubborn pliability the Durbanville earth give them. Over the years they’ve adapted, digging their roots deeper, toughening up, learning how to handle whatever mood the climate decides to throw their way.

Which, in 2026, was plenty.

The season started well enough with a good gonad-freezing winter, exactly what the vines needed to stock up their reserves. Then things turned hot, dry and windy from November through January. Not ideal. Not comfortable. The kind of weather that makes vineyard managers wake up at three in the morning wondering how much damage the wind has done.

But somehow the vines took it in stride.

Juandré Bruwer, who works alongside Louw in the cellar, shrugs it off with the calm confidence of someone who’s seen this movie before.

“Our vines are unirrigated,” he says. “They’ve adapted to the vagaries of the climate and consistently give us well-ripened grapes.”

In other words: tough vines make tough decisions unnecessary.

When harvest started on 19 January, the grapes coming into the cellar had exactly what Sauvignon Blanc needs: bright acidity, expressive aromatics and that razor-sharp balance between sugar and freshness that makes the wine snap to attention on the palate.

From there, the cellar team moved quickly but carefully. The juice fermented cool — between 13°C and 16°C, locking in the aromas that make Sauvignon Blanc such a wildly addictive drink. A short rest on the lees added a bit of texture before the wine was bottled.

And then, just as nature called for, it was ready.

What you get in the glass is exactly what you hope for when someone hands you a chilled Sauvignon Blanc on a hot afternoon.

The nose jumps out first: gooseberry, passion fruit, white peach. Bright, unapologetic aromatics that practically climb out of the glass. Then the palate comes in sharper, tighter — a streak of acidity holding everything together while flavours of granadilla and melon spread out across the tongue, followed by a faint green whisper of asparagus and fig leaf.

It’s fresh. It’s crisp. It tastes like summer just arrived.

Interestingly, the wine comes from the estate’s younger vineyard blocks. The first three parcels harvested. Vineyard work plays a big role here: leaves are removed to open the bunches to sunlight, nudging the flavour profile away from grassy and green toward something more tropical and generous.

It’s the kind of small, practical vineyard trick that separates a decent Sauvignon Blanc from one people actually want to drink again.

Of course, harvest time for a Sauvignon Blanc producer comes with its own peculiar pressure.

“As a Sauvignon Blanc producer, harvest puts you in a vice,” Louw says.

On one side: grapes that must be picked, crushed and turned into wine before they lose their magic. On the other: customers already asking where the new vintage is.

It’s a good problem to have.

Because when everything works — when the vines behave, the cellar runs smoothly and the timing lines up just right — you get a bottle like this. A wine that’s barely weeks removed from the vineyard, still buzzing with the energy of a new vintage.

And for around R95, it’s also one of the easiest pleasures you’re likely to find this season.

Henning Retief, viticulturist for Kleine Zalze Wines, has spent 20 years shaping the vineyards behind one of South Africa’s most celebrated wine brands. He doesn’t do it with fanfare. He does it block by block, slope by slope, and season by season.

There’s a moment in every harvest when Henning knows. Not because a machine tells him, not because a number on a spreadsheet confirms it, but because the vineyard itself speaks. “We go,” he says, leaning forward with the certainty of someone who has earned the right to say it, “when the grapes are calling.”

That instinct has been two decades in the making. Henning joined Kleine Zalze Wines in Stellenbosch in 2006 and has been at the heart of every major chapter in its transformation ever since: from a hands-on family farm to an internationally recognised brand whose wines land on tables from Cape Town to Stockholm, a winery and brand now under ownership of French wine powerhouse Advini. Here Henning is not the loudest voice in the room, but he may be the most important one in the vineyard.

His connection to agriculture goes all the way back. Both parents grew up on farms, his family has roots in the Swartland sheep country, and he spent his school holidays driving tractors and helping with harvests. He grew up in Strand and Somerset West, surrounded by the rhythms of the wine industry almost by osmosis. “Agriculture and vineyards have always been part of me,” he says simply, but with conviction.

After early stints at Annandale wine farm under the legendary Hempies du Toit, and time spent working in Robertson, Henning first set foot on Kleine Zalze in 1999 during a harvest. Parts of the farm had no roads. No houses. “I saw it when it was nothing,” he laughs. By the time he returned to stay in 2006, things were moving, and they haven’t stopped since.

Today, Henning oversees a sourcing network of approximately 60 producers, with around 90% of fruit drawn from Stellenbosch, supplemented by carefully chosen parcels from Durbanville, Darling, and Piekenierskloof. Managing a portfolio this size requires not just technical expertise, but something rarer: the ability to build genuine, lasting relationships with the people who grow the grapes. “You need trust,” he says. “Open, honest, long-term relationships. I look for growers who are willing to adapt, to evolve, to try new approaches. I look for people who are in it for the wine game.”

What he’s not interested in, is generic. When Henning visits a vineyard, the question he carries with him is: What is the site giving us? Every slope, every aspect, every soil type tells a different story, and he’s the kind of person who actually listens. He matches cultivar to site with the precision of a craftsman. Because, for him, planting the wrong grape in the wrong place is a conversation stopper before a single bottle is ever filled.

The physical rhythm of his year is relentless. Pruning runs from June through August. Spring brings a cascade of viticultural work to prepare the vines for the coming season. Then harvest arrives, and Henning is fully immersed, personally in the vineyard blocks, monitoring sugar levels and ripeness plot by plot, making the kind of granular decisions that only come from deep, embodied knowledge of a place. “You cannot replace experience and old core fundamentals,” he says, “but technology can strengthen them.”

He’s no Luddite, this Henning. Kleine Zalze was among the first estates in Stellenbosch to adopt metal vine poles at scale, enabling easier mechanical harvesting and lower maintenance costs. Innovation, yes. But never at the expense of getting the basics absolutely right. “Doing the basics very well,” he will tell you with quiet conviction, “is the key to success.”

The 2026 harvest arrived approximately three weeks earlier than expected — Shiraz running two weeks ahead of the previous year. Henning had already been watching. He’d seen the signs coming and was ready to move. That readiness is everything.

Ask him what excites him in the vineyard right now and his eyes light up. He’s personally drawn to Grenache, Cinsault, and Cabernet Sauvignon, and he enjoys a good Chenin Blanc with genuine pleasure. But the variety that truly animates him at the moment is Alvarinho, the elegant Portuguese white grape he’s currently working with just one or two producers. “Scarce,” he says, almost reverently. “Distinctive. Full of potential. Watch that space.”

After 20 years, Henning has grown not just alongside Kleine Zalze, but within it. Colleagues became close friends. The institutional knowledge he carries is the kind you simply cannot buy or shortcut. He stayed, he’ll tell you, because of the people and the environment, and that says something powerful about a workplace, and about a man who values authenticity above almost everything else.

He operates without fanfare, largely behind the scenes. But when you taste a Kleine Zalze wine that sings — the fruit precise, the site character unmistakable — there’s a good chance Henning Retief was in that vineyard long before the winemaker ever got involved, asking the right questions, listening carefully, and waiting for exactly the right moment to move.

Because the grapes were calling. And he was already there.