The Best Wine Stories Aren’t on the Label. I’ve Made It My Life’s Work to Find Them.

I still remember the exact moment wine stopped being a drink.

It was a sweltering afternoon at Meerlust Wine Estate – one of those Cape days where the heat sits heavy on the vineyards and the mountains seem to shimmer at their edges. I was standing outside the cellar doors when they slowly opened, and out of the cool darkness stepped Hannes Myburgh, Meerlust’s legendary owner, blinking into the sunlight. The aroma hit me first: fermenting grapes, earthy and alive, rolling out of the cellar like a welcome. Then the light caught the specks of dust in the doorway, and something changed. I was twenty-something, still figuring out what I wanted from life, and in that single, unhurried moment, the Cape Winelands answered the question for me.

I grew up in the English Midlands village of Great Hayward before my family moved to Johannesburg when I was a child. I’d imagined a future in law, but wine had other plans. What the Cape does to people is difficult to explain to those who haven’t experienced it. It isn’t simply the wine, though the wine is extraordinary. It’s the particular alchemy of mountain passes folding into ancient valleys, of cellar doors…