Glider

http://canpha.com/

Hollywood comes to town

Stellenbosch%20movie%20midday%2002%2007%20002.jpg

Two of the lead actors in the road outside the slave-built Welvanpas mansion. The man with the boom is recording the sound of a departing bakkie (pick-up truck). You can probably detect that the parting was not on good terms.

Stormhoek is way out in the rural, rustic hinterland – deep in the hills, on a cul-de-sac, bump-bump dirt road traveled by few cars and the twice-a-day bus. But something really exciting is happening in sleepy hollow! Hollywood has arrived. A hundred bustling technicians, actors and producers have taken over Welvanpas, our next-door neighbour. We know a lot about this as the only road to and from Stormhoek passes through the Welvanpas front yard.

They are filming and recording everything from the picking of grapes, “Cut. Can we do that again more slowly?” to the owls in the darkened oak trees, all of which is a backdrop to a soapy story that covers seven hour-long episodes.

The story is in Dutch and Afrikaans and centres around a small wine farm in Stellenbosch in the 1990’s, showing how the owners and the workers got along day by day after Nelson Mandela set everyone free.

The series is designed for television in Holland, with the action taking place in the great house, on the front stoop (verandah), in the front yard of the mansion and elsewhere in the vineyards and cellar.

When we go to town to buy anything, we have to stop to wait while a shot is completed and it’s the same when we come back.

Shooting is set to complete on March 11.

Seeing things

Pinot%20Grigio%20harvest%2002%2007%20001%20web%20image.jpg
One of the world’s favourite white wines is made from the red grapes of Pinot Grigio
We squeeze grapes to get the juice out.
For white wines, we throw the skins away. For red, we ferment the skins and juice all mashed up together.
With red grapes, like Pinot Grigio, we have to squeeze softly. Otherwise we’ll end up with rose or red wine.
The colour and a lot of the flavour is in the skins and a lot of the flesh just below.
When you make a white wine like Pinot Grigio from red grapes the colour contains a hint of gold.
White skinned varieties like Sauvignon Blanc give you wine with a touch of green.
Most champagnes are made from Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier (red grapes). That’s why a glass of champagne has an aura of sunset.
Celebrate the colour of Pinot Grigio and Gewurztraminer and champagne.
If you see colour, you know there’s flavour.

Back in South Africa, the Baboons Roam…

Baboon%20damage%20wider%2001%2007%20001%20web%20version.jpg

Whilst all the action is happening with “The Stormhoek/Tesco Love Tour” in the UK, we have an amusing rendition of Gorillas in the Mist, in our vineyards…

An hour before Sunrise, back in the Cape, I heard a rustle ouside… Twas a troop of baboons in our Mountainside Chenin Blanc vineyard, munching on sweet grapes for breakfast… When i realised they were eating grapes in our highest block, I headed up the mountain to sneak a view. Unfortunately, the “lookout” spotted me and the group (ma and pa and many teenagers and baboonettes) melted away into the mountain fynbos.

All I had to show for their presence was a flattened vine where a 70kg baboon (pa) had been reclining and munching bunches.

Not a bad start to a sunny Saturday morning… nothing like a little excitement on both sides of the world! ;0)

Global warming is real

Stormhoek%20Pinotage%202007%20harvest%2001%2007%20003.jpg
Many Pinotage vineyards are planted as bushvines. Winemakers feel that the variety gives richer juice when the vines grow in this absolutely natural way.

Stormhoek’s absurdly early 2007 harvest is a demonstration to the world that temperatures are on the increase.
Is anyone listening? Mr. Bush, you can abandon your doubts. It’s true. We’re picking grapes 2 weeks earlier this year. It’s the earliest that anyone can remember, at least anyone under 50. I don’t count, as others feel that older people always think that things were better in the past.

We started picking Stormhoek Pinotage 2007 on the 30th of January and finished on the 31st. Some things to note. The vines are grown as bush vines (not trellised on wire supported by poles), just like rose bushes. They are near to the ground, so the pickers have to be supple.
Bush vines always produce a balanced crop of grapes. That means that the proportion between the number of branches and leaves (green stuff) can support the number of bunches of grapes, while still remaining healthy.
And you won’t see any irrigation lines.
So though the climate is dry and hot, the vine sends its roots down into the clay-rich soil and its moisture load.
If you want to make great Pinotage, these are some of the things you have to be aware of.
More to come as the fermentation starts.

Getting your hands on a bottle

Cape%20Wine%202006.JPG
This is a view of last year’s South African wine trade fair Cape Wine 2006. This one of hundreds of trade fairs that showcase wine producers’ goods to potential importers, distributors and retailers all over the planet. Everyone behind these counters is hoping that someone with a route to customers will fall in love with what they are doing and a fruitful relationship will start. Its a bit like a teenage dance.

The rules of how you get wine to shops in the USA where people can buy it are very complex. It requires many thousands of people to make this system work.
There are more people working in liquor distribution in the US than work in wine production in South Africa, and we pick almost all of our grapes by hand and most cartons are filled and stacked by hand.
Though this is a giant American business, there are only a small number of importers who can show your wine to the multiplicity of distributors.
That makes these importers very powerful.
How do you get one of them to know who you are?
In the UK and Holland, and to a lesser extent, in France and Germany, the route to market is dominated by half a dozen major buyers in each country.
If you think of all of the brands of wine out there, being made in Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Australia, Rumania and so on, maybe a million brands all together, how are they going to find a way to the customer?

Old part of town, new life

Signal%20Hill%20opening1155.jpg
Signal Hill, South Africa’s newest winery, is in Cape Town’s historic centre. Photograph by Andrew Ingram

The old financial heart of South Africa, the couple of blocks bounded by Adderley, Burg, Wale and Shortmarket Streets, has a new winery.
In London, this part of town is called The City. In Cape Town it’s called Upper Adderley.
It also has a couple of deluxe hotels (they’re described as 6-star in the brochures), a 400 seater, multi-level restaurant and plenty of smaller ones, plus all kinds of opulent decadence (pools, spas, cigar bars, whisky clubs). They are all new and they all look old.
They are in a development retaining all of the old colonial buildings while adding a heavy touch of lux on the inside.
You can roll out of goose-down dreamland, pull on your shorts in front of the harbour view and sip extra creamy latte while watching the harvest go through the tiny wine press.
This baby winery crushes grapes from 11 minute vineyards. Three of them are in the city suburbs, planted between the houses.
Signal Hill Winery belongs to Jean-Vincent Ridon, French-born Capetonian who inveigled for a city-centre winery for 10 years. And there it is.
Derick Henstra, Dutch-born Cape Town architect, designed the whole Mandela Rhodes complex with the wine cellar as its hub.

You will need to bring a French phrase book.
All of the wines have names like ‘Clos d’Orange’.
No screw caps here.

Made to fit

_42480181_ian_pain_barrels1.jpg

Each barrel is a hand-crafted masterpiece, made for the customer’s needs, in the same way that a Savile Row tailor makes a suit for you (well, perhaps not quite Thomas Mahon and English Cut, but I’m sure get the idea).
Every barrel you can see on the Devon beach above was made for a specific job.
This is how it goes. A winemaker orders a barrel, or 10 or 20, made from not just oak, but oak from a particular place, for the wine that he will make from a specific vineyard.
Different forests, growing at different altitudes and soils produce different textures and flavours in oak.
The customer specifies the wine he is going to put in it and asks the cooper to toast the barrel staves (planks) over a wood chip fire to an exact degree, like you ask for your meat to be grilled just the way you like it, such as rare or medium. He knows the type and length of toasting that he needs to suit the wine that will ferment in there.
When the barrel is finished it is checked to see that it is ‘winetight’. And then it is wrapped in plastic and labelled with the customer’s name, plus the treatment.
Looking at the MSC Napoli mishap on the bright side, wine lovers who complain about too much oak in wine should be happy with the 2007 whites from South Africa.
And no top garden in Devon will be complete without a thousand dollar barrel feature.

Harvest Blues

_42482765_tom_hurley416n3.jpg

Looters take home booty, while barrels for South Africa’s best whites float by.

Photo by Tom Hurley

Temperatures are rising. In thermometers and in winemakers’ pulses.
Where are the barrels?
The grapes are nearly ready. The green is turning golden. The space in the barrel room is ready for the expected new white wine barrels.
But the barrels are on a wintry beach, on England’s rocky south coast.
Winemakers order their barrels hand-made from French coopers to arrive in the last week of January each year, 2 weeks before the juice is ready for them.
The bad news is beginning to spread around.
More than 2000 barrels destined for South Africa’s premium white wines left France last week on the MSC Napoli, as part of the 2400 container cargo bound for Cape Town.
The ship was broken in two by storms last week and lies, tilted at 35 degrees, on Devon beach.
I used to be involved in the barrel business. I know that every day this week importers will be fielding calls saying something like “Where are my barrels?”
The sad news is that the barrels are not coming.
We’re going to have to learn to like tank-fermented Chardonnay.

Hard to get a drink

Jan%201%20wine%20purchases%2001%2001%2007%20002.jpg
Liquor laws are different wherever you go. In South Africa, liquor (that’s wine, beer and spirits) can’t be sold in an off-license on Sundays or public holidays.
Except for a couple of exceptions.
In Cape Town, Harley’s is one of a few places where they can sell wine and stuff for several hours on these forbidden days.
This year New Year’s Day was on a Monday. That means that most of Cape Town had to buy what they needed to celebrate before or during Saturday. If you forgot or didn’t buy enough you had to drive all the way to Harley’s.
I went past Harley’s a couple of times on January 1 and each time there were crowds of people staring at the closed doors.
Inside, the place was seriously busy. When some customers were let out, some more were allowed in.
The management told me that it was important that all the customers who left with bottles had paid for them first.

The great DNA mystery

pinotage%20and%20pinotnoir1106_new.jpg

Red wine grapes are green before they turn red. In South Africa, that’ll be next month for most vineyards.

All Pinotage grapes are rugby ball-shaped, while Pinot Noir berries (as we call them) are more spherical.

This is a bit of a puzzle as Pinot Noir is the understood to be the father (or the mother) of Pinotage and that’s a bit like a 1.6m dad having a 2.2m son.

Pinotage has thick-skinned grapes with masses of red colour just under the surface when they’re ripe. You can see the great dollops of colour in the wine. Pinot Noir, on the other hand, is thin-skinned and very shy on colour. Cinsaut, the other parent of Pinotage is also very thin-skinned.

Unfortunately none of us was around when the new variety was conceived in the 1920s.

So, is there a DNA lab somewhere that we can go unravel the bedroom secrets of grape varieties?

Continue Previous page Next page

Elsewhere.

Stormhoek Activity