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Veraison Road Trip

Early yesterday morning I drove up the N1 from my home in Cape Town turning northwards on the R44 at Wellington, a small town sheltering from the promise of heat in a depression at the foot of the Groenberg mountains.

Beyond Wellington the R44 flings you on to the yellow and ochre swells of the Swartland – the rolling wheat stubble expanse popping a small smile inside your heart.

I turn left at the hamlet of Hermon towards my first stop, The Outsider Shiraz Vineyard. Planted in 1976, the grumble of gnarly vines skips over the ridge like a thousand aging heavyweight boxers on the comeback trail.

Every year in this vineyard the same vine colours its precious rubies before all the others. This stage, “veraison”, sees the softening green berries slowly turn to ambitious pink, then red, then purple-black when fully ripe.

I walk through the dried grass between two rows, towards the Riebeek Kasteel mountain into whose wild wrinkles snatchings of morning sun disappear, unable to soften her ancient granite gaze. You always pull your eyes onto the ground in case a puff adder, still too cold from last night’s reprieve, can’t move away from your intrusion in time.

I am two rows too far down the slope when I spot the battered old vine, colouring up like a grandfather on Viagra and too many glasses of port. I clamber over the low, rusted trellis wires until I am face to face with the beginnings of Vintage 2006. The sight always forces a sigh from me, simultaneously the sound of relief, and the igniting of tingling nerves – those first high-school dance nerves, those on parade, up-to-the eyeballs-in-wonderment nerves, those toes-on-the-precipice, fingertips-on-lips, nerves.

It confirms the world is still cranking over the seasons, just. But that old vine also snorts a pugnacious challenge to the tightrope-walking of harvest decisions – picking decisions, whose timing will determine the critical difference between a great wine from an also-ran. And a thriving wine business from failure.

I aim the mystical Subaru east, back to the R44 – The old warhorses of The Outsider Vineyard contained for a second in my rear-view mirror. The buzz has begun.