In the name of diversity, my drinking does include some modest partaking of elixirs other than wine. Now I am fervently preparing for summer by ensuring that my list of warm-weather refreshing drinks is up to speed, and barring one or two exceptions, the upcoming festive season will see the imbibing of a few trusty and spirited coolers.

I don’t much use the word cocktail, for this implies one requiring a set of flashy mixing-skills, donning a floral Hawaii shirt and walking around with a stainless-steel shaker. My mixed drinks are tres ordinaire and have never failed my personal wants as well as those of my guests.

Few things beat the trusty gin-and-tonic for a daytime summer drink. And with the stupendous number of flashy gins on the market, one is spoilt for choice. I don’t, however, much like the florally scented and fruity gins that are so in fashion. Gordon’s is pretty much my go to. However, the straight-up Musgrave Botanical Gin provides a perfect balance between a juniper-driven gin with a bit of vooma and some refreshing botanical flavours.

As one should always do when selecting your gin, try a neat sip to determine its suitability in terms of strength and flavour. And here Musgrave is on-point – I have even taken to drinking it neat with a bunch of ice and a slice of lemon. The immediate kick of alcohol leading to that irresistible numb, pleasurable feeling is an added incentive for knocking it back neat.

However, the G&T is this gin’s perfect home. One-third Musgrave Botanical, two thirds tonic-water and a slice of lemon….joy comes in simplicity. There is the hearty hit of gin spirit soothed by the reverberating freshness of the tonic with a citrussy lemon cut. A lovely drink. And don’t believe in all the press about the crafted tonic waters being superior – Schweppes is just fine, my dear.

Despite being of mature age, the bitterness of the Negroni has never done it for me until this winter past when I joined some fashionable ladies before a fireplace in sipping these gin drinks. One part gin, one part dry Vermouth and one part Campari and lotsa ice. This thud of crunchy bitter does have something going for it and sure does sharpen the appetite. Once again, making my own Negronis at Casa Joubert I found Musgrave totally ideal as those manly big-branded gins force the bitterness just a bit.

Having done some long-haul flying over winter I had plenty of opportunity to indulge in my favourite airport drink, namely the Bloody Mary. Vodka, tomato cocktail, ice, Worcestershire Sauce and Tabasco. Why this drink appeals to me in airport lounges I cannot say, but I get a craving for a Bloody M just by seeing an airline commercial on television.

Like the G&T, I am picky about the vodka used in this bloody marvellous drink, and of late I have decided that I am a Stolichnaya fan. This once Russian spirit is now distilled in Latvia and is the perfect mixing vodka, although a few neat shots of ice-cold Stoli does have its charms in times when called for.

I mix one-third Stoli to two parts tomato cocktail with a few ice-cubes in the glass. Worcestershire Sauce and Tabasco, of course….but here’s the kicker: A Swedish bar-tender recently lifted my Bloody Mary to new heights by serving it with a strip of crispy bacon. Yes, a lengthy line of golden-brown grilled bacon in the glass of Bloody M. Sipping the tomato-and-vodka drink between nibbles of crunchy bacon made this the most satisfying drink of the year so far, the only trouble being that you may really be tempted to have a Bloody Mary for breakfast.

Cap Classique and other sparkling wines are terrific bases for mixed drinks, with – talking of breakfast – the Mimosa being a case in point. Orange juice – freshly squeezed, of course – is the traditional Mimosa ingredient, with one-third juice to two-thirds fizz. However, after watching the second series of White Lotus set in Sicily where the characters were breakfasting over pineapple Mimosas I had to try this. Gorgeously fruity with the Cap Classique’s sparkly wine-flavoured fizz elevating the pineapple to new levels of cheerful, cheeky morning-drinking enjoyment.

While on the matter of sparkling wine, do not forget the Black Velvet, a mighty mixed drink especially worshipped by those of us with Irish roots.

For this, take a beer glass and fill halfway up with Guinness or any other stout – Castle Milk Stout is great – and top-up with a Cap Classique or Champagne. The quality of the fizz matters here. One sip and the name comes to life, a dark velvety curtain of creamy black stout complemented by the zingy freshness of good sparkling wine. A great drink with oysters and at times when reassuring fortification is required, deliciously.

As a winemaker, Bruwer Raats is a guy the American poet Walt Whitman would define as one containing multitudes. Wine brand builder. Son of the vineyard soil. Engaging conversationalist and promotor extraordinaire of his acclaimed wines. And now South African Winemaker of the Year, as per Tim Atkin, MW in his 2023 Special Report on South African wines.

But I’ll always remember Bruwer’s thing with rocks. First time we met for a wine chat some two decades back I expected this hearty fellow Afrikaner to braai me some wors, haul out a few bottles and chew the fat on wine and life and the world, and all that stuff. After all, I know a kindred spirit when I see one.

What I got instead was being hauled to a quiet top-level room in Bruwer’s house on Polkdadraai in Stellenbosch to look at a row of rocks placed on a gleaming wooden counter. Here were diversely shaped chunks of granite, slivers of slate and clods of shale. Then there followed a lecture on how soil and rocks and earth affect wine – and not any wine, but the wines he was then making, and continues to make. Only difference between now and back then, is the levels of success those bottles of Raats wines have accumulated locally and internationally, both commercially as well as in terms of critical acclaim.

And his hands have always been in the soil. “My father was a high school principal and wherever we moved to, he made sure to have a big garden,” says Raats. “Myself and my brother Jasper would work the garden with him, or just us two, growing vegetables and stuff. We were not a farming family, but those gardens got my mind going about soil and plants. Add this to the fact that my parents liked do drink wine and share it with us kids from an early age, and winemaking slipped onto my radar pretty easily.”

Despite this love of land and its rocks, vines and slopes, Bruwer was from the outset clear on his vision of not wanting to own a wine farm. With the benefit of hindsight and the realities of how the Cape wine industry has developed over the past three decades it can assuredly be said that when graduating from Elsenburg Agriculture College back in 1995, Bruwer was ahead of his time.

“Back then the concept of a winemaker starting his or her own brand was no industry convention,” says Bruwer. “But this is what I planned to do, the only plan. To make the best wines I wanted to make under my family name without huge investments in vineyards or wineries.”

To realise this vision, he sought experience in other parts of the world. America for the cellar technology and winemaking logistics. Germany for a scientific and very meticulous approach to viticulture. And Italy to experience the passion and personable approach of tradition and the role family and people play in making wine the cultured product it is.

Back in South Africa he did some work in the cellars of others, most notably Blaauwklippen, Delaire and Zorgvliet, but when the first own-label Raats Family wines rolled out in 2000, Bruwer’s journey to the very top echelon of the South African wine offering began.

“My focus on Chenin Blanc came at the right time, as this was at the beginning of the Chenin-revolution that saw people like Irina von Holdt and Ken Forrester take this work-horse of the Cape wine industry and turn it into what I believe the country’s most distinctive and alluring white wine,” says Bruwer, modestly not claiming the rightful role of Raats Family Wines in elevating Chenin Blanc to new levels of excellence and acclaim.

He loves Chenin Blanc’s ability to express a sense of place, in Bruwer’s case the Polkadraai Hills region in Stellenbosch. “People thought I was crazy with my commitment to Polkadraai when starting out,” he smiles. “Back then it was the arse-end of Stellenbosch wine country more known for vegetables and bulk wine production. But I have always believed in that region’s fantastic granite and dolomite soils that are more rugged and visceral in expressing the site through the vines. Until today, Polkadraai is the home of Raats Family Wines where I work closely with growers to get the grapes I want for my style.”

And in dolomite and granite Chenin Blanc can trust. As Raats Family Wines has shown over the years, the brand’s various wines express enticing degrees of variation, but all united in their steely mineral grip and energetic fruit core.

On the red side, Bruwer is known as a pioneer of Cabernet Franc, the old Loire and Bordeaux variety that way back in France, teamed up with Sauvignon Blanc to create Cabernet Sauvignon.

“I was working at Blaauwklippen in the late 1990s and came across a barrel of red with a perfume and sensual palate, the likes of which I had not experienced in Stellenbosch,” he recalls. “Upon learning this barrel was Cabernet Franc I had that ‘right, that’s it’ moment. Chenin Blanc on the white for Raats Family Wines, and Cabernet Franc on the red.”

Suffice to say that while there were only a handful or Cabernet Francs when Raats Family Wines started off, it is currently one of the most talked-about red varieties in the South African diaspora and rapidly becoming a sought-after calling card for the Cape on the local and international wine scene.

Oh, and there was the fruition of Bruwer’s vision to create an icon wine, a red Bordeaux style blend which he launched in 2004 with Mzokhona Mveme. Not only a cult wine emerged, but one of the first true partnerships between black and white wine personalities. MR Compostella it’s called, and from release it has been talked about in revered circles, being one of the consistently excellent wines that resulted in Atkin confirming Winemaker of the Year Status on Bruwer.

“It’s been an amazing journey thus far and awards like these are for sure a great honour,” says Bruwer. “My name might be on the bottle, but it’s all a team effort. This includes the growers of my grapes, the Mvemve Raats partnership and my cousin and partner Gavin Bruwer Slabbert who oversees all the vineyard management and winemaking production of our brands Raats Family Wines, Bruwer Vintners and Mvemve Raats. The most rewarding is knowing that I took decisions I wanted to take that proved to be the right ones. For my business, my family, my team as well as the people that appreciate South African wine and recognise its status as being among the best the world can offer.”

A lot of fat worth chewing.

The lie of the wine culture having been brought to South Africa by white Dutch settlers has to be buried under the organic compost heap it deserves, says local political party EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters). Following a recent statement by EFF leader Julius Malema that the sport of rugby evolved in South Africa long before European colonization, the EFF’s Dr Sapling Mizipissi said sub-Saharan Africans were making wine centuries prior to Jan van Riebeeck and the Dutch East India Company landing at the Cape in 1652.

“Today the legacy of Van Riebeeck and his colonialist cohorts assume the misguided honour for beginning the vineyard planting and the winemaking in South Africa, when it is a fact indigenous peoples had been doing this long before the first Dutch ships landed,” says Dr Mizipissi, who is the EFF’s spokesperson for revisionist agriculture.

“By the time these settlers arrived, the local Khoisan people were already crafting wine from certified old vineyards, while in the Eastern Cape the black tribes had perfected the art of cold-fermentation on white grapes as well as presiding over a natural wine movement. Punch-downs with assegai heralded a revolution in tannin-extraction, for example. So, the current historians and wine companies must stop perpetuating the myth of Africa having had to wait for the colonialists before wine was made in South Africa. Wine is as African as, well, other African things.”

Official history marks the Cape wine industry as beginning on 2 February 1659 when Van Riebeeck oversaw the harvesting of the first wine grapes.

“Such lies need liberating, as while Van Riebeeck pressed his grapes in what is now Cape Town, the cool caves of Table Mountain already held wooden barrels of fine wine that had been created by generations of Khoi peoples,” says Dr Mizipissi. “In fact, in 1659 the indigenous folk were already holding a Khoisan Vigneron of the Year Competition, had a Khoi Winemakers Guild and were exporting wine to Zanzibar and Indonesia. This has all been obliterated from the annals of history by a European mind-set wishing to impose its insular superior thinking on the indigenous legacy of Africa.”

Dr Mizipissi says that Africa also had a major influence on the wine culture of various European countries. “When Bartholomeu Dias sailed around southern Africa in 1488 the Portuguese had no idea of what it is to fortify wine,” he says. “It was only after landing at Mossel Bay in the southern Cape and being invited by the local peoples to an ostrich barbecue that Dias was introduced to sweet wine strengthened with distilled spirits. Of course, he took a barrel back to Portugal with him, stole the technique of fortifying and since then that country has claimed status as the home of the Port wine. When this is totally an African thing.”

Asked about the grape varieties planted in pre-colonial South Africa, Dr Mizipissi said that as sons of the soil, Africans are the true masters of terroir.

“The indigenous vines of Africa were crossed with plants liberated from some French Catholic missionaries in the 9^th century,” he says. “Using vines developed by massal selection as well as clones developed in the kraals of the Eastern Cape, Africans were spreading vines to selected sites over all South Africa identified by our masters of the soil. Three centuries before Van Riebeeck arrived, the pre-colonial, true winemakers were aging wine in barrels made from the yellow-wood and stinkhout trees, as well as doing skin-contact on white wines and fermenting with yeast strains grown in calabashes.”

Dr Mizipissi says the EFF will from 2024 be dispelling the myth of South African wine being the exclusive result of the white man’s endeavours since 1659.

“Comrade Malema is set to enlighten the world on the true history of wine in South Africa, underscoring the need for reviving the rich legacy of viticulture and winemaking here at the southern tip of Africa,” he says. “The EFF recently recovered some barrels of pre-colonial local wines such as Pinot Gwahr and Rhinotage from the great African vintages of 1346 and 1501. These will be presented at a tasting to international dignitaries attending the inauguration of newly-elected South African president Julius Malema who, as we all know, is the only person in the world to make his own history.”

Dear Marnus

So, my godson is considering becoming a winemaker. First, of course, the Matric exams you began this week must be completed successfully. But of this I am in no doubt – as your academic track-record to date shows. Then follows a year travelling through Europe, during which you will have to decide in which direction to study on your return, and your father told me you are considering a BSc in Viticulture and Oenology at Stellenbosch. Week-end past the old man asked me what I thought of this plan, seeing that I waltz around the world of wine. But you and I know one another well enough by now for me to side-step my dear friend and chat directly to you.

Until now, your exposure to wine has been one of pleasure and fascination, as it should. I think you were 14 when your father and I were discussing and drinking a bottle of Hamilton Russell Chardonnay when you asked for a taste. Perhaps you were bored, somehow, by that cellphone glued to your hands. Or maybe you had a youthful interest in the enthusiastic manner in which the two old men were describing our respective impressions of that specific wine to one another. Perhaps you, with your keen eye, were struck by the way the wine glowed golden in the glass. But you wanted a taste, and we gave it to you. You smiled. I still remember that smile. It said a lot.

That was four years ago, and since then, you have shown an increasing interest in wine, the different labels, grape varieties and the excitement some of the bottles evoked among your father and I, Uncle Carl and your Aunt Frances. You even began sending me articles you had read about Eben Sadie, Danie de Wet and Jan Boland Coetzee, as well as the label of a bottle of Sancerre you had procured a taste of at a friend’s house.

There is thus no shadow of a doubt that your interest in wine is already imprinted upon your mind, that open young mind of youth that has the world waiting to bestow its vitality on you. And if it is vitality you want, wine is it. Because wine is life.

But to follow a career as a winemaker you will need more than a fascination, although that is where it all begins and where it will end – should you go down that route.

As a possessor of a modest BA Hons degree in journalism, I cannot advise you on the demands of the BSc degree that is your stepping-stone to a vinous career. But judging by your current level of interest, I believe you will launch yourself into the aspects of soils, climatic influences and the life-cycle of the vine with keen abandon. There will be tastings and vineyard work and time in the cellars, and in your fellow students you will see that people driven by a love of and zeal for wine are truly good people in all of their different ways. Ways as diverse and engaging as the various wines and grape varieties you will experience.

You will leave university equipped to join the ranks of professional winemakers, hopefully still spurred on by the interest you now show in the subject with such starry-eyed eagerness.

One cannot predict where you will begin to ply your trade. Possibly as an assistant in one of the Cape’s cellars, or – with your father’s help and admirable international connections – at a winery in another country. Which, I believe, will be a good thing. Wine connects nations and people, and you will – whether it is France, Chile, New Zealand or Italy – share a common language and values and insights wherever you find yourself in the vineyards of the world. You will become part of that world. That world of wine. And it is a good thing. A great thing.

My experience working with various wineries allows me, however, to emphasise that there is a lot more to being a winemaker than harvesting, blending and overseeing the process to the end result.

For one, every winemaker I know has an exceptional palate, an ability to taste a wine from its cool entry to the mouth right down to the very soul from where it expresses nature through itself. There must be an ability to imagine the best state that wine can be in while it is fermenting, through to its coarse lusty youth. And by using your imagination and skill, you must decide what steps to take to ensure the best wine is created, cared for by you, from that specific year. It is on your watch that this responsibility lies. A good winemaker is a master of his or her senses. And an ability to see something in that wine that we mere mortals on the periphery and even the best critics cannot.

Just as wine and people have forged a social symbiosis over 8 000 years, you as winemaker will have to be a people’s person. (Your personality, my boy, should stand you in good stead here. Unless something goes wrong in Europe or at university.)

Your success as winemaker will largely be determined by your relationships at your place of work. With the vineyard and cellar workers. Your superiors who own the property they have employed you to work at. The various technical and marketing consultants needed to steer the business wherein you find yourself. Journalists and critics will call to pick your brain, taste your wares and hear what you have to say.

You will be entrusted with showing the bottles you have created to retailers and restaurant wine-buyers. Not only explaining the unique traits of each wine to them but convincing these sometimes-hard-nosed business folk that your relationship with the product is as trustworthy as it is with those who will buy and stock your wines. You are the brand, and the brand is you.

Broad-shoulders are required, and you should never bottle a wine of which you are not proud. The consumer and the follower of winemakers and brands will not have your intimate knowledge of grapes and winemaking, but we are not easily fooled.

But what I admire most about the good winemakers I have the privilege of knowing is that they are individuals and they are artists, restless in their respective visions of what they want to express through wine. There are many winemakers. But there will only be one that is you. And there are many wines, but there will only be certain ones that will have been made by your hands and cared for by your soul and very being.

I cannot think of anything better. Mull this over as you step out into the world before deciding what the next phase of your life will hold. And don’t forget to bring back a bottle of Corton Charlemagne for me and your old man.

Fondly yours

The Godfather

Now that the secreting of juices is abating and those clods of dampness drying after the initial excitement with which the release of Tim Atkin’s Special Report on South African wine has been met, a calm question is deemed relevant: why is the industry unable to make meaningful inroads into world markets when international commentators, speared by the admirable support of Atkin, are more than ever bestowing words of praise on the country’s wines?

Despite the glowing reviews, words of encouragement and ecstatic commentary, the latest export figures make for worrying reading. In the year to end August 2023, total wine exports fell from 400,5m litres to 317m – a hefty 83m litres. Packaged wine dropped 146m to 122m, with bulk going from 254m litres to 195m litres. (SAWIS figures rounded off.)

There should be concern. With local consumption never really going to suck-up the bulk of South Africa’s annual wine production, the success of the industry as a whole lies in exports and the international community’s acceptance of wine bearing the names “South Africa” and “Cape”.

And just a reminder, success here is badly needed. As official industry bodies continue to state, the people and institutions responsible for the wine sector are under severe pressure. Only 12% of producers are profitable. Of which 49% are breaking even. Some 39% continue, for some or other weird reason, to operate in the production of wine and growing of grapes at a loss.

Now back to Atkin and his admittedly comprehensive and insightful report. Like other influential international commentators, Atkin does a continued great job in enthusing on the excellence of South African wine. For 11 years he has sent uplifting and flattering messages into the world via his South Africa Report. “The most exciting wine country on earth” and “making the best wines in its history”. These positive statements are backed by his ratings, a department wherein he as a taster is no slouch having through his professional career gained a reputation for being a top-notch critic. If he gives 95pts plus to a wine, the glory is real. And in Report 2023, 201 Cape wines hit that spot.

The question that needs asking is, with the consistent flattery and top ratings bestowed on South African wine from international critics over the past two decades, why has Brand Cape Wine not succeeded in converting these marketing benefits of acclaim and recognition from respected international voices into a profitable and solid export proposition?

How come, as the current declining of export volumes shows, is South African wine peddling backwards? And then we are not even talking about the industry’s inability to, after decades of generic export marketing and the producers’ impressive individual forays in the world markets, command decent wine prices.

Industry bodies have met the current slump with nothing more than a shoulder-shrug and the usual chorus of excuses. “It’s happening all over the world.” “Load-shedding”. “Shipping issues.” “Inflation in Europe”. “The war in Ukraine.”

Surely, if so, the world’s most exciting wine country producing the best wines in its history should be less susceptible to an international decline than others?

New Zealand, for example, does not appear to be feeling the so-called global slowdown. In the year to end July 2023 Kiwi exports grew 21% to R27bn with the exporting of 310m litres of wine. Average per litre price – packaged and bulk – R85 per litre, a figure that’s make a Breedekloof bulk-grower crush a brandy bottle with his forehead.

After watching this scenario play-out over 25 years without any major change in the prominence, profitability and inroads of Brand Cape Wine on the international front – despite being “the most exciting wine country on earth” – I’d hazard that a lack of innovation and exciting, practical profile-building overseas lies at the root of the status quo. Nothing to shake things up, think outside the box and rattle the cages. Or disrupt, as was the key coin phrase a few years back.

Where value grew, this is largely the fact of a plummeting local currency, as one Johann Rupert had to point out in a tweet to Vinpro a few years back.

The official wine industry bodies’ general machinations of promoting South African wine and its unique fabric internationally have been as tedious, static and predictable as the English national rugby team’s offensive strategy: Attending a few overseas shows. Showing international journalists around who can perpetuate the message of a dynamic, interesting, innovative and beautiful wine industry – without the subsequent word and articles making one iota of difference in the fortunes of Cape wine. The even-breaking producers keep breaking even. The profit-losers keep losing. The profitable ones remain in the minority.

The industry’s new arm – Wine South Africa – could do well to throw-in a creative division into its collection of units to stop this perpetuation of uninspiring thought and monotonous practices in attempting to get the industry out of the rut. Which is not current, but where it has been since the advent of the country’s democracy and the opening-up of export markets.

Going with the flow is not an option.

The first French invasion of the South African winelands was back in 1688 when those Protestant Huguenots fled their motherland for the Cape, bringing a much-needed Gallic influence on the VOC’s Dutch-Germanic attempts to get a wine culture going down south. And this influence proved to play a significant role in establishing vines and making decent wine in Cape Town and the Boland.

A more recent French wine wave has been from the French south, down Montpellier way – but with a decent dose of influence from Pretoria. And this is something Naretha Ricome would not have seen coming when the Pretoria-born blonde began working in the French wine industry after studying politics and economics at the University of Nimes.

Today Naretha – a maiden Smit – is the link between the Cape winelands and the French wine behemoth Advini, Frances’s third largest wine company outside of Champagne, which 11 years ago began investing in Cape wine properties and currently owns five substantial Stellenbosch wine businesses. Naretha’s head-office might be in the Advini home-town of Saint Felix de Lodez outside Montpellier, but from that base she plies her trade as the person responsible for Advini’s South African portfolio constituting L’Avenir, Le Bonheur, Kleine Zalze, Ken Forrester Wines and Stellenbosch Vineyards.

“It actually all began right here,” says Naretha, where we are sipping rooibos tea – the morning is still early – on L’Avenir Estate. “After matriculating in Pretoria, I came to study political science and French at Stellenbosch University, and as many students do, I got myself a part-time job working on a wine farm. For me, this was L’Avenir, at the time Francois Naudé was making those great wines here.”

A two-year break during high school to be schooled on Reunion Island ensured Naretha was already fluent in French when she arrived in Stellenbosch. And upon graduating from university, her heart was set to continue studying economics and politics at the Sorbonne in Paris. The dream was, however, guillotined by the famed French bureaucracy.

“When I arrived to register at the Sorbonne, I had my file of completed forms checked by the registrar and was asked, ‘yes, but where is your pink form?'” she recalls. “My file contained a form for every colour in the rainbow, but no pink one. So, I was told not to worry, you can come back to register next year – just don’t forget the pink form. Au revoir.”

No pink form will get a girl from Pretoria down, so Naretha set-off for the French south and was accepted by the University of Nimes where she completed an honours degree in economy and politics.

“Of course, the south is big wine country, and with a cursory knowledge of wine gained while working at L’Avenir, I started doing internships at various wineries in the Languedoc,” she says. “But my aim was to work at some place in Châteauneuf-du-Pape.”

This is when things began happening for Naretha at the tempo of a Paris-Marseille TGV speed-train. She landed a job at Maison Ogier in Châteauneuf which was owned by the Advini group. When Advini bought-out Michel Laroche from Chablis her eyes lit-up. For Laroche had owned L’Avenir, where her foray into the wine world had begun. With the Stellenbosch estate now in the Advini fold, Naretha put-up her hand, requesting to take-charge of the French group’s new Stellenbosch interest.

“Advini was actually set on selling-up in Stellenbosch and getting-rid of L’Avenir,” she says. “But I asked them to take a look at the potential of Stellenbosch as a region, South Africa as a wine country and the potential of the wine industry back in my home country.”

Naretha was told, okay, then you take charge of L’Avenir and if you show a profit in a year, Advini keeps the farm and the brand.

As per the Advini strategy, the first priority at L’Avenir lay with the vineyards and the farm’s people. “Advini’s major shareholder is the Jeanjean family that has farmed in the Languedoc since 1872,” says Naretha. “These are people of the vine, the soil and the land. Wherever we get involved as a group, the land and people come first. And from day one the French were stunned at what they found at L’Avenir: terrifically unique terroir. Superb Chenin Blanc and Pinotage. And wonderful people, South Africans whose values, work ethic and love of the soil, vineyard and wine suits the Advini ethos like a baguette in a picnic basket.”

And before you could say “coq au vin”, Naretha’s French bosses agreed with her vision to look seriously at the South African picture and to invest in more farms and brands. L’Avenir was followed by Advini obtaining Le Bonheur, like L’Avenir set in Stellenbosch Simonsberg. Then came Stellenbosch Vineyards, followed by Ken Forrester Wines. And finally, Kleine Zalze.

Naretha underscores Advini’s philosophy of allowing each of its wineries to maintain its independence and unique identity. “Take your own story and your history, make the best wines from the varieties your terroir is suited to – back in France we will provide support, especially through sales and distribution.

And of course, as France’s third largest wine business, profitability is non-negotiable. “Today, Advini’s South African interests represent a substantial part of the group’s profitability, so yes, I am truly proud at the way this has turned out.”

A major reason for profitability is Advini’s access to international marketing channels. This has, for one, allowed Le Bonheur to become the largest South African white wine brand in Canada. Focus on Cape-specialities Pinotage and Chenin Blanc has seen L’Avenir enjoy formidable success. And Kleine Zalze and Ken Forrester are strong in the UK and Europe.

“The South African leg has been running well for Advini,” she says. “Plans to expand? Definitely.”

Yet, outside of our rooibos-sipping in L’Avenir’s guest-lodge, the wine picture is looking somewhat gloomy. Vineyards are being pulled-out, producers are leaving the industry. Cape wine exports tanked 18% over the past year.

“Concerning your last observation, remember the wine industry globally is under pressure,” says Naretha. “Inflation in Europe is throttling consumer-spend. Supermarkets are changing the way they manage working capital, which has decreased stock-holding habits, while shipping companies are implementing leaner, more focussed and streamlined business models. There’s no space for excess high-volume products or freight where margins are low and the business can’t turn cash quickly.”

And what about South Africa where, 33 years after sanctions ended, the wine industry is still largely seen as an international supplier of cheap, high-volume wine?

“The image and price of Cape wine has to rise so as to make it profitable for farmers to keep vines in the soil,” she says. “From Advini’s side we are working hard to position our South African farms as strong, recognisable brands, which is just as important as getting good wine into the bottle. Look, the quality of Cape wine is stunning, overwhelming actually – otherwise my French board and shareholders would not be here. So, for Advini a top priority is to expand the reach of our brands and further entrench them as desirable, premium wines throughout the world. So far so good – with more to come.”

As should by now be evident, Naretha’s heartbeat remains warmed by the African sun, and she visits the Cape every few weeks. Home is in Costieres de Nimes where she lives with husband Nicolas on his family farm Château de Valcombe.

“All the clichés about living in rural France are true, and the French just make it all look so easy,” says Naretha. “We’ll just plonk an old wooden table next to the vines, stick a few flowers in a vase, lay-out some bread and cheese while Nicolas brings a few bottles of his wine…. It’s a wonderful culture and lifestyle of which I am fortunate to be a part of.

“But each time I visit South Africa, I am reminded how warm the people are here. On this, we are truly unique. Working with them and the Cape wine industry, while living where I do in France makes me realise I truly have the best of both worlds.”