Drinks: Love, frogs and viognier

The wine that Samantha O'Keefe makes at Lismore near Greyton turns terroir into poetry, writes Jacques van Zyl

'I'm multi-faceted," Samantha O'Keefe jokingly responded when I wrote to her, with some trepidation, asking for an interview. So much has already been said in the media - about herself, her estate Lismore in Greyton, and the story that brought her here to make wine on the most beautiful farm. I hadn't been sure I could add to it meaningfully. Yet I felt compelled to try.

What drew me was a memory of a first visit to the farm, more than a year ago. Driving up the bumpy trail with a friend to her home, I was horrified at our wheels crushing legions of what I took to be crickets, jumping in the road. Later I saw they were frogs - tiny black ones, in their thousands.

What brought me back now was as much a sense of these frogs as of the burnt, unmoved mountains; a white dress in a box seen through a basement window; a sentence remembered: "Love is supposed to be simple"; and, mostly, a wine I'd had, and the person who made it.

The origin of the name "viognier" isn't clear. It's assumed to derive from either the name of the French city Vienne or the Roman pronunciation of Gehenna, the Judaic valley of death, or hell - the latter, it's said, because of how difficult viognier is to grow and to vinify. My original hope was to draw Lismore as some kind of local Château-Grillet, the traditional home of rare, ageworthy viognier from ancient, low- yield vines; a single-estate appellation of only 4ha, high in the Rhone valley.

Lismore's viognier has been compared to that of Condrieu, an area in France known for producing many of the world's best viognier wines - beautifully sculpted, concentrated white wines displaying flavours of peaches and dried fruit, white flowers, spice and melon. Mostly, due to lowish acidity, Condrieu viognier is meant to be drunk young, with notable examples lasting up to eight years.

As apt and as flattering as some of these comparisons may be, they also diminish. Lismore's viognier is unlike any other I've tasted, locally or elsewhere. Its charm, richness and complexity, not to mention its almost European cool-growth acidity, far outshining even well-made local examples. And not only those. Small wonder that Lismore wines are now listed at many top restaurants, in Europe, the UK and locally.

With only 12.5ha under vines, Lismore isn't a large estate. One cannot help but wonder how O'Keefe has done it. (She was once assured by a critic, who may or may not have worn heels, that she would never succeed. Doesn't one's most dire opposition often come from those on the inside?)

O'Keefe herself keeps referring to how blessed she has been, with the exceptional terroir, with friendships and well-timed advice, with having been supplied with the exact French clones she now grows so well. As someone once remarked, who says luck is not a skill?

But what I see is care and perseverance and sensitivity and, most of all perhaps, a natural sense for winemaking.

At one point I couldn't help but ask whether she was sure she wasn't as much part of this terroir she so praises as the slopes and the snow and the broken-up shale, as even the clouds of starlings swooping on her vineyards.

Bluntly put, Greyton is a ward because of her vision and efforts, with a terroir so profound that, perversely, it's difficult to get excited about. There's merely a sense of surprise that it hasn't always been that way.

As the day drew on and the bottle we'd opened became emptier, the wine kept changing in my glass. "It's opening up," O'Keefe said.

But there was something more remarkable - not one sip was the same as any other. I've experienced this in other wines, but never to such an extent. This viognier was becoming a wine which made me want to rush out and rent a foodie movie. And in the hush, just before the sun set, as a solitary jackal buzzard started cutting up the sky, I had my last sip.

"Look at the colours," O'Keefe prompted. But there was something new in my glass now. It was as if someone had dropped a single flower into it, and quickly removed it. I struggled to identify the scent - maybe bletilla, or perhaps bauhinia. Something light mauve, either way. I suddenly wished I had bent down to better smell the orchids I'd photographed earlier, on the way up to the farm.

And then, almost as quickly, it vanished, leaving only the faintest redolence of opened earth and lees and old oak barrels; a final hint of young honey as I swallowed it down.

One comes away from Lismore with a sense of awe. There's little ordinary in the persons and wines one finds here, yet each one somehow opens one's eyes to the miraculous in the ordinary. Mystery doesn't lie in what's shrouded or withheld, or in the details we allow to peer through, but in that things are as they are. Love is essential but simple.

As I drifted home in my car, through the now invisible wheat fields and greyed-out mountains, I hazily thought: here still be dragons - tiny amphibious ones, no more than the size of crickets.

• Jacques van Zyl was the recent recipient of the Franschhoek Wine Valley Wine Writer of the Year award.