My year of wine: Every bottle we open inspires a longing for the hills

22 July 2014 - 02:00 By Jackie May
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Around a table in my local wine shop, I drank with other wine buyers on Saturday. After a few tasting bottles were opened, it dawned on me that we don't drink to get drunk.

A customer browsing the shelves was looking for something "my old Stellenbosch school friend makes". You could hear the nostalgia in his voice. Or was it envy?

One of the women I sat with had grown up in Portugal. The rest of us were from the Cape.

Take the owner, for instance. Corlien Morris comes from Ceres, an apple growing area not known for its wine. But on her family's deciduous fruit farm, Koelfontein, there are small vineyards producing extraordinarily delicious wines.

We opened a bottle of their 2009 Koelfontein Shiraz. We drank the wine and spoke of crisp mountain air, dewy morning walks and busy harvest times.

As the bottle of 2011 Rietvallei Red Blend opened, I heard how one of my fellow shoppers lost her farm. The only child of a wine farmer, when she married a black man shortly before the 1994 elections, she was promptly disinherited. She spoke wistfully of growing up in the countryside, but said she doesn't miss the business of farming. "But, oh, how I miss the lifestyle," she said, pouring me another glass.

We drank and talked, and Pam Nyoni, the shop's wine adviser, told us stories of old vines with trunks the size of big trees. When she spoke of terroir, I imagined the smell of the soil. The sound of birds. The taste of grapes. I could feel the hot sun.

The wine, and its stories, swept me from my view of the Johannesburg car park to a faraway vineyard, making me long for the hills. I left the shop with five bottles of wine, a port and an overdraft, but without a hill I could call my own.

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