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.