The Story of Fynbos

The farm saga began one Saturday afternoon in our small Observatory house. It was a warm lazy day and Johan and I were sitting in bed surrounded by newspapers. The phone rang. It was the excited voice of our friend Jinx. “Guess what?” she exclaimed, ”Shilo has gotten a scholarship to the architectural school in…

The morning of the 27th June dawned bright and early. It was a glorious day with glistening sunshine and cerulean blue skies. The pantechnicon arrived in park Villa Street, Observatory, at nine am, and by midday had loaded the possessions we had spent two weeks packing. This included amongst other things the giant elephant Johan…

Our first few months on the farm saw us excited and overwhelmed. It took quite a while for us to gather ourselves. Rubbish Our initial activity was to attend to the rubbish on the farm, and to this end we bought a bakkie – a Toyota diesel – and began carting rubbish to the Malmesbury…

We were pretty clueless that first harvest. We had close to thirty hectares of grapes – Chenin, Pinotage, Columbard, and Chardonnay – which we somehow had to get from our vines to the Swartland Co-op. Following the advice of our neighbours, we organized to pick up a group of harvesters from the `coloured’ township of…

It took us at least two years to become fully accustomed to living on the farm. And we were very busy. Johan was still doing some teaching at UWC, and I spent two days a week in Cape Town seeing clients and teaching. The rest of the time, we attended to the myriad of things…

Winemaking We made our first wine in two thousand and four with friends and much hilarity. We stamped the grapes in plastic buckets on the farmhouse stoep, and then transferred the buckets to a barrel, which after standing a year, produced surprisingly nice wine. The following year we insulated and kitted out a single garage…