To Dublin and Dar-es-Salaam – and dealing with effluent back home 6 February 2008

The year gets underway for Martin Moore

Great things await us...
Let me tell you what I believe we can expect from the new vintage, with the first grapes due at the cellar within a week or two (two, judging by how things are going at present).

I was deeply worried about the vintage because of the quite unseasonal weather, with lots of rain, strong winds and overcast days. Visitors saw very little of the Cape's famous beach weather - the season just wasn't blossoming properly into summer. My concern was what effect these adverse weather conditions would have on the vineyards.

I needn't have worried. There was no fungal outbreak anywhere in our ward, the water table remained high, the vines remained healthy and, above all, the grapes ripened slowly in the cool weather, with all the indications that when they reach optimal ripeness they will also provide us with a richness of concentrated flavours. There is indeed every reason to be highly optimistic about the season.

Tasting wines on the Emerald Isle
I was hardly back in town when I had to take off to the UK for discussions with our new agents in London and from there to Dublin to talk to our Irish representatives of some three years standing. I have developed a special affection for the Irish. Their national tipple may have something to do with this, for it invariable changes my outlook on life for the better. While there our agents arranged a tasting of our wines for the media and a most positive response we had. Especially afterwards, when we exchanged tasting glasses for drinking glasses.

The Irish market in my experience has changed quite markedly over the past few years. Before the astonishing economic boom of recent times that has brought to its shores many skilled people from elsewhere, the wines on the shelves were, in my recollection, mainly French. In the last few years, however, New World Wines have started to dominate, and there is a strong demand for more fruit-forward wines such as ours with Sauvignon blanc in particular gaining in popularity.

Sweating it out with the best of them
Out of the cold winter world of the Emerald Isle I found myself two days later sweating it out with the best at a wine show in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, with the mercury pushing 40°C. I realised again that although we are from Africa, we still seem to know and understand very little of this continent of ours. Dar-es-Salaam is a fascinating market. It serves not only overseas tourists streaming to the famous game parks and nature reserves of both Tanzania and Kenya, but also an increasingly affluent local community whose members show the same tendency to conspicuous consumption as you find elsewhere in the world. Some of our local producers believe this is a market mainly for medium-priced wines. We export our top-of-the range single-vineyard wines and they sell very nicely, thank you.

Being kind to nature
In caring for the environment we have to deal with a push-pull situation of a different kind. On the one hand, living close to the soil, one has a deep-seated desire to protect and enhance the environment you work and live in. On the other, you don't have much of a choice, for the market demands of you to be environmentally pro-active if you want its support. What better motivation can there be!

Against that background I am delighted to tell you we have just commissioned an environmentally friendly effluent water treatment plant with an aerobic respirator that aerates and purifies all our run-off water to irrigation quality. Seriously, though, effluent is a major problem in a wine cellar. In the wicked old days, long, long ago, it was simply allowed to run into the municipal drains (if there was one handy). No more, so cellars are creating their own facilities to recover such water. Ours is, I am told, state of the art (what a joy is one-upmanship!).

With the new dam completed we have started looking at how we can reduce our carbon footprint, for the fermentation process produces a lot of carbon dioxide that escapes into the atmosphere. In addition to vineyards planted in front of the cellar almost up to the front door we also established 4 ha of olive trees at the back, all doing their level best to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen.

But that's at most only a start. We still have a long way to go.

• This contribution is extracted, with permision, from the Durbanville Hills January newsletter. It appears in full on the Durbanville Hills website.