100 bottles of Two Square Miles

This weekend the sleepy valley I call home is going be holding its inaugural Mediterranean-themed food and wine festival, called (not surprisingly) the Riebeek Valley Medfest. It’s an excuse (like we need one) to showcase the cooking talents of our locals chefs and the area’s outstanding wines – each restaurant has chosen a Mediterranean country to represent food-wise, and has been paired with a wine producer.

I am part of a fabulously quirky shop called The Wine Kollective, which sells great local wines at cellar prices. We’ve been paired with neighbouring restaurant Bar Bar Black Sheep, whose imaginative and popular chef will be serving Portuguese food. Both the wine shop and the restaurant are located in our town’s ‘shopping mall’ – Short Street (‘not short on character’, and it’s not!).

My 2008 Dean David 2mile2 has been in the bottle for about six weeks now, and is due for release in July. But the Medfest comes only once a year, so I’ve decided to do a little pre-release for this special occasion: just 100 bottles. If you want to get in at the grassroots of a good thing, come to the Riebeek Valley Medfest and claim a bottle for yourself.

Casting your vote

The recent proliferation of election ad posters have somehow made it into my dreams – although why, I can’t imagine: the sentiments are all so seriaasly similar. “United we stand”, “Every vote counts”, “Together we can make a difference”, “Vote for change”. And while I know politicians aren’t known primarily for their good looks, the cookie-cutter cheesy grins and (in some cases) Botoxed earnestness are just so boring. One would think that with one of the most liberal and advanced Constitutions in the world, they could find it in themselves to be a little more entertaining.

On a different voting note, the SA Blog Awards are now open. I’m putting my tick next to Salmagundi’s box in the ‘Best original writing on a South African blog’ category. While I love the blog (I do! I do!), I have to admit to a little bias here: I lodge with Muriel, who is one half of Salmagundi. The other is Juno, who also has a fabulous food blog, and she’ll be getting my vote for things that make my mouth water.

Another member of Muriel’s household is the labrador/border-collie puppy Balu, the ‘Monster Baby’, who behaves with a startling lack of fear that belies the fact that she’s only been in the world for three months. I, myself, am a puppy in the blogosphere, but I’m going to do a Balu here and insist that my millions of readers click here to go to Salmagundi and cast their vote for this very worthy homegrown blog.

Medfest

In the Western Cape this weekend? Try a different route and taste some great food at the Medfest

Punching down

Nature knows best

I think the best wine, the most honest wine, the most delicious wine, results when it’s left alone to do its thing as much as possible. I choose my grapes carefully, and this is one of the reasons I want my wines to express their terroir – the DeanDavid 2008 2squaremile Syrah, for instance, is so called because the four Shiraz blocks from which the grapes are selected are within, well, two square miles. And I think it’s a shame when a vintage that might otherwise have been unique is tampered with and ends up tasting of something other than what Nature intended – wood, say. As is pointed out on http://wine.appellationamerica.com/wine-review/564/Natural-Wine.html, if Nature gives us a difficult vintage, let’s taste it!

The fermentation of my wine is the only ‘processing’ it undergoes. The yeast and bacteria used in this step convert sugar and acids into alcohol and carbon dioxide in the course of their normal metabolism – and who am I to mess with that? I do regular ‘punch-downs’, which are gentler than their name suggests and really only ensure that good grape-skin contact is maintained with stirring. Wood contact is necessary, of course, but I reuse my barrels for as long as possible, and less than 10% in any one vintage is new wood.

And minimal intervention doesn’t apply only in the cellar. Restricting the use of chemicals in the vineyards is every bit as important, as is careful harvesting – I do mine the time-honoured way, by hand. (Spare a thought for our pretty Cape Dwarf Chameleon, a harmless, vineyard-loving little creature whose numbers were decimated when some farmers introduced mechanical harvesters into their vineyards; and that isn’t even to think about the fact that some of the wines produced as a result of this mechanisation contained essence of chameleon.) Not raping forests for wood (for barrels) is a biggie, as is responsible recycling (the DeanDavid 2008 Syrah is bottled in recycled bottles).

The blog mentioned above lists the eight constituencies of the Natural Wine Movement: ‘the best wine makes itself’, care of the environment, winemaking ‘without all the weird stuff’, wariness of recent technological innovations, controlling the sources of food, wines that improve with time, wine made from grapes alone, and not making wines that all taste the same. I subscribe to most of these. What do you think?

The Slow Food movement is beginning to take off around the world – so why not Slow Wine?

A crazy possibility

I’ve been making wine for seven years now, and thus far it’s been a labour of love. I’ve begged, borrowed and been wildly creative with limited funds, which sometimes meant scraping the bottom of the barrel (yup, pun intended).

But now I’m stepping out into the ‘real’ wine world – the one where people actually try to make a living from it. And you know what? People keep telling me I’m crazy. Why? Oh, they’ve got their reasons: it’s a tough market or the market is pretty saturated; there are more financially rewarding things to do; the world’s economy is imploding. Nothing I don’t know.

But getting here – to the point where I’m making enough wine, and good enough wine, to try to make a living from it – took a long time, and I’m not giving up. I began in the dark, in more ways than one. I was a nocturnal creature for 10 years from the age of 19, living the typically work-nights/sleep-days life of someone in the restaurant trade: waiter, barman, manager and, finally, wannabe sommelier. In those days, the food was considered adventurous if the restaurant had a salad bar and Parmesan was kept in its own fridge (and handled with a gas mask and gloves for fear of contamination). Granted, this was down south Alberton way, so it wasn’t exactly a culinary hub.

Then the Naked Chef revolution began and soon iceberg wasn’t the only lettuce you could get and words like Nicoise not only started appearing on menus, but most people pronounced them right.

Me, I hotfooted it to London. I wanted to be where it was all happening. London opened up new horizons for me – ironic, in a city where there’s no physical horizon; and where it takes an hour to travel 4km (something you only realise during Tube strikes and you suddenly discover that your place of work, five Underground stops away, is actually around the corner if you walk to it).

London also opened up wine for me. I sure opened enough – during the years I spent in restaurants there, I must have popped the corks on 7 000 bottles. I began learning about wine – about quality, about pricing, and about the people who drank it and loved it (although the two didn’t always go hand-in-hand).

When I came back to South Africa, I was looking for something. Vineyards. An hour from Cape Town, in a small country town, I found them – serried ranks of them, often neighbours to orchards of olive trees. The first time I made wine myself I removed every grape from its stalk by hand and fermented my harvest in bin liners; I did the crushing the traditional way, with my feet.

A few months later I was standing next to a barrel of wine at the annual Olive Festival in our dorp, piping wine into jugs and reused bottles. I served it by the glass, too, and when appreciative customers smacked their lips and said, ‘Mmm, and who’s the winemaker?’ I said, ‘Me.’

It was crazy then and it still is but I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.

I’d love you to join me on my journey.