Wine of Origin

As far as the kitchen was concerned, there wasn’t one. For the first few years I cooked (Jo does not cook except under extreme duress) on a gas ring on a counter under one of the windows or braaied outside.

I’m tall but not unusually so. Our shack however, was designed for unusually small people.

When the land we live on was subdivided, our portion amounted to about eight hectares, much of which falls in a deep gorge through which the Buffels river runs. We moved onto the property in 1996. Most of it was covered in bluegums, wattle, pine and blackwood.

Jo and I moved to Plettenberg Bay from Grahamstown, in the early nineties. I’d been teaching at Kingswood College and when my son James matriculated we decided to throw our lot in with Peter and Caroline Thorpe and start a commercial fishing business.

I’ve always been a red wine drinker. In Grahamstown where I grew up, there were some excellent bottle stores. The best by far was at the Grand Hotel towards the lower end of High street. It was run by Tony Reich and it was a magical place.

So I’ve always liked to garden. When I was in high school I was once asked what I’d like to do for a living and I said “grow tomatoes”. The idea still appeals. But what does gardening have to do with farming? Well they both involve growing things and they both have a really strong aesthetic appeal. I think of growing vines as gardening on a larger scale.

In the 1970’s and 80’s the Eastern Cape experienced a series of severe droughts. There were periods of relief but some of them went on for years. I had the depressing feeling that desertification was stalking out of the Karoo and into the coastal escarpment and I still believe this. If you look at the names of farms in the Karoo, like “Rietfontein” and look for a spring or stream of any sort in vain, you sense that the place is much drier than it was.

I have always liked gardening. In my first year at university I lived at 56 Beaufort street in Grahamstown. The house was an old Georgian mansion – those who know Grahamstown will recall the building with its Yellowwood pillars and bay windows.

I hope this short account will interest those who hanker, as I have all my life, for a connection to the earth. This sounds grandiose and poetic and so on, but it isn’t really.

I grew up in Grahamstown (Makhanda) and when we were children we spent every holiday and weekend at Port Alfred in the Eastern Cape and if we weren’t swimming or sailing we were fishing. The bait and tackle shop made quite a lot of cash out of us but we never caught anything except streepies.