By Lafras Huguenet

There are wines that impress, and there are wines that endure. Then, on very rare occasions, there are wines that seem to step outside of time altogether: wines that do not merely survive the decades, but absorb them, refine them, and emerge with a kind of quiet, unarguable authority. Emile Joubert wrote about one, namely Vriesenhof’s 2003 Pinot Noir. Great wine, but still a pup.

How about the 1986 CWG Grand Reserve from Delheim, crafted by Guild member Kevin Arnold under the watchful eye of Delheim pater familia Spatz Sperling, a far more senior number showing that marked authority.

To encounter it now is to engage not only with a wine, but with a philosophy, one rooted in patience, restraint, and a deeply European sensibility of what fine wine might aspire to be. In the context of contemporary Stellenbosch, where ripeness and polish often take centre stage, this wine speaks in a quieter, more measured voice. Yet it is precisely this discretion that commands attention.

The colour of this Grand Reserve 1986, at first glance, tells its own story: a limpid garnet core fading gently to brick at the rim, suggestive not of decline but of evolution. There is no murk here, no sense of fatigue. Only a poised transparency, as though the wine has shed all excess and now stands revealed in its essential form.

Aromatically, it unfolds with the slow grace of something that knows it has nothing to prove. There is cedar, certainly, and the faintest trace of cigar box, those familiar signposts that might indeed recall the great growths of Pauillac. But alongside these come notes of dried rose petal, of old leather-bound books, of forest floor after autumn rain. The fruit, though no longer primary, persists in a haunting register: redcurrant, perhaps, or a whisper of plum, now softened and interwoven with the tertiary complexities of age.

On the palate, the wine achieves that most elusive of states: harmony without inertia. The tannins, once undoubtedly firm, have resolved into something silken and almost architectural: present, shaping, but never obtrusive. Acidity, too, plays its role with quiet assurance, lending lift and continuity without ever asserting itself. There is a seamlessness here, a sense that every element has found its rightful place within the whole.

One is struck, above all, by the wine’s sense of proportion. There is no excess, no flamboyance. Only balance, clarity, and a kind of inner luminosity. It is, in this respect, profoundly “old school,” though that phrase scarcely does justice to what is achieved here. If anything, it reminds us that the so-called old school was never about austerity for its own sake, but about fidelity. To site, to structure, to time.

And time, indeed, is the silent collaborator in this wine’s achievement. Four decades have not diminished this great Stellenbosch Bordeaux blend; rather, they have distilled it. What remains is not power, nor even complexity in the conventional sense, but something rarer: a feeling of completeness. The wine does not evolve in the glass so much as it reveals itself, layer by measured layer, each nuance contributing to an overarching sense of calm coherence.

There is, inevitably, a poignancy to this experience. Spatz Sperling was a figure of immense character, a custodian of tradition in a landscape that would, in time, change dramatically. To taste this wine is to glimpse his vision and Arnold’s craftmanship – not as an abstraction, but as something tangible, enduring, and quietly eloquent.

What, then, does one say of such a wine? It is not “impressive” in the modern sense, nor does it seek to dazzle. Instead, it invites reflection. It asks us to consider what we value in wine: immediacy or longevity, impact or integrity. In its composed, unhurried way, the 1986 Grand Reserve offers an answer.

Magnificent, absolutely. But more than that, it is instructive. It reminds us that greatness in wine is not a matter of scale, but of balance; not of novelty, but of truth. And in doing so, it stands as a quiet testament to what Stellenbosch has achieved, and will continue to do so. Thanks to the foundations laid by Delheim and others.

1. A gin martini can never be too cold or too dry.

2.  Don’t buy wine to resell it. Buy out of love, and that love will grow to the extent that you’ll never want to let it go. And neither should you.

3. Read everything on wine written by Andrew Jefford and Terry Theise. They give worth, credence and respect to your obsession. And make you feel all the wiser and the better for harbouring it.

4. Never kiss a girl with the smell of brandy-and-Coke on her breath unless you want your morals tested and a beating-up from her girlfriend.

5. Pay no heed to the prescriptiveness of food-and-wine pairings. They are only there to stifle imagination and to keep one from the path of adventure and discovery.

6. Never trust any wine advice from a vegan or vegetarian, for they cannot know what true taste is.

7. A whisky requiring more than two ice-cubes in a double-tot pour can lead to blindness.

8. Never lap Vintage Port from the belly-button of a Portuguese virgin without asking her permission first.

9. A fine Havana cigar makes any alcohol beverage taste and smell better.

10. Never argue with a French sommelier until you have whacked him to the floor first. A true gentleman disagrees from the moral high-ground only.

11. Do not confront a host who has served you box-wine from a decanter. But do pee on his toilet seat on your way out.

12. There can never be enough Champagne, ever.

What are your rules? Comments welcome.

Every time I hear a wine critic state that South African Pinot Noir does not rival the quality of the wines made from this variety in Burgundy, I want to ask said person: How stupid do you think we really are? My journalism professor warned our class about the alienating boredom of the Well Known Fact, which aforementioned assertation on Cape Pinot Noir as compared to Burgundy is.

And for further news, which I will state on behalf of these monotonous sages of matter vinous: Yes, South Africa will never make Pinot Noir like Burgundy. Neither will Napa, nor New Zealand, Germany or the vineyards surrounding the Tamil hide-outs in Sri Lanka.

Why the temerity to state this? Well, no New Zealand sheep-farmer will ever offer a leg of lamb comparable in flavour to one from South Africa’s Karoo. And no date-palm growing on the banks of the Orange River in the Northern Cape will present a date to the intoxicating degree of treacle-sweetness as one from Morocco.

But is the leg of Kiwi lamb or the unctuous Northern Cape date inferior to that originating from the geography of the other? Only in the eyes of the beholder, who wants to see them as such.

The Cape will not ever create Pinot Noir like Burgundy, but it can offer great Pinot Noir in its own right, one worthy of respect in the most rarified circles of Burgundian be-fuckedness. I know, for I have had a few. Most recently the Vriesenhof Pinot Noir 2003 made for the Cape Winemakers Guild by Jan Boland Coetzee.

It was Jan’s favourite Cape Pinot Noir vintage, and he was not shy to call it as good as Grand Cru Burgundy, but one that speaks with a South African accent, implying that the two regions will never interpret the variety in a manner of duplication. This was ten years ago, when Jan and I sipped this wine over a breakfast of saffron-yellow farm-eggs and impala sausage. Now, in 2026, this Vriesenhof Pinot Noir is spectacular in every sense. Forget about the variety, it is just a magnificent wine, to my mind the GS of Pinot Noir. Although far scarcer, but no less icon-worthy.

The wine was decanted, a deep shade of ruby with a slightly lighter, crimson edge on the glass. It smelt like wine, the dramatic, brooding soul of the fermented grape, randy and growling and almost confrontational. No rose petals. No truffle. No poncy fruit-charm. This wine has such big balls it wouldn’t last 15 minutes at a Sea Point trance party without getting groped.

It had been in new wood, see. When it comes to wood, Jan Boland did not stuff around. Cement eggs, clay amphorae: toys and showpieces. Wood. French. Tight. Hard and new.

The wine was fermented in new wood, punched down. Then malolactic fermentation, then aged for 10 months. The full monty.

Thus, 23 years later, it is as dark as the heart of a Hamas sniper and as robustly pure and healthy as a German gymnast training for Oktoberfest. There are cultured power and domineering personality, in texture and flavour.

Tannins are still coiled like whore-house bed-springs with a decade of bonking still in them. The tannins bear flavour. It is iodine and liquorice. Black-pudding made from the blood of Iberian pigs and cured in a hollow cave for months. The savouriness meets surly runs of cherries the size of Kate Winslet’s nipples, only tighter and less liquid.

This Pinot Noir takes the text-book, rips it up and sets it alight with the breath of underfed, furious dragons. No willowy grace, easy-fruit or overdone tertiary forest floor or knobbly wet truffles. Just an attack, a grip and an overpowering run of brilliant wine.

Power in its glory. One of a kind, never to be replicated

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.