Joostenberg Estate and Myburgh Bros

Q. What’s the question you get asked the most on vineyard tours?

 In the winery people are often really fascinated by the different vessels we use for fermentation and maturation: the barrels, the amphorae and the concrete eggs. I get a lot of questions about why we use these different vessels.

Q. What do these different vessels give to the wine?

The main thing is that we are trying to get the vineyard to speak. So whichever vessel we use, we don’t want something that adds too much flavour to the wine. I find that the clay amphorae give good texture to the wine but they don’t add any specific tastes, like a barrel would for example.

Q. Can you tell us about Waffles the Sheep?

We have our lambing season in April and unfortunately Waffles’ mother didn’t like him very much, so we ended up having to take him into our house, or rather our winemaker Mia took him home. She fed him and kept him going for a while and now Waffles is just part of the family!

Q. And can you tell us about how you use the sheep in the vineyard?

So this is quite an important part of what we’re doing. During the winter months, the sheep graze in the vineyard, and the combination of their manure, urine and even their saliva ends up in the soil and that attracts all kinds of microbes and insects, and it acts as this little starter culture for our soils, which is part of our regenerative farming practice. It’s all about soil fertility and we find that they really help us with achieving that.

Q. Can you tell us about Myburgh Bros and how it all came about?

My great-grandfather and his brother made wine together in the early 1900s and they also farmed with pigs and made butter; they were quite innovative and they were entrepreneurs. And the Myburgh Bros wines are all about looking at what they did, so we’ve taken some vineyards in our community, which we don’t own, they’re on neighbouring properties, and we are using those to make wine. And the label is a little pig, taken from a very old black-and-white photo of one of their favourite ones! The wines are all made with a similar winemaking philosophy as Joostenberg, using natural fermentations, and the wines are really fresh and pure. That’s what it’s all about.

Q. What would you pair with your noble late harvest?

I quite like tarte tatin. The wine’s got this beautiful, caramelised apple aromatic. My sister makes tarte tatins fairly regularly and the two really match.

Q. And what would you pair with the Klippe Kou Syrah?

We actually had a dinner on the farm the other day with our winery customers. We did roast leg of lamb, served in fairly thick slices, and then my sister made this sauce with a little bit of anchovy and a little touch of chilli, and it just added this amazing flavour to the lamb. And the Syrah was perfect with it. It’s got this almost wild side to it, and that pairing just worked beautifully.

Q. What can we find you doing when you’re not at the winery?

I love spending time doing a bit of snorkelling, and we have a season where you can catch crayfish, and I really enjoy doing that. I love being outdoors, we have a lot of mountains near us, so on weekends we enjoy climbing the ones around Stellenbosch.