Woes of wine farming are a refrain of local lament these days. Others just get on with it.

Areas like the Olifants river region are realistically tuned into the local business. They call it agriculture. It’s desert country up there along South Africa’s west coast, and the Namaqua orange earth remains barren, unless you get water in regular supply. It’s into this scenario that wine production there must fit. Which it does.

Thanks to some very clever thinking decades ago, and bright geographical engineering, the great Olifants river is very effectively tapped to provide water for sustainable farming. With that, the fertile wasteland, basked in sunny warmth, can deliver gloriously on such delights as potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes (it’s the heartland of famous All Gold tomato sauce), and exotics like saffron (thanks to Jan Ponk and Renske van Zyl’s spirit of adventure at their Draaihoek farm).

Table grapes did (and does) extraordinary well, growing in healthy abundance. The serious move to wine grape production was simply a sideways move from here, even though it did require substantial new viticultural knowhow in modern times.

(Wine grapes had been cultivated for local consumption and brandy longer than a century, but it was really only in the past decade that wine production became a significant regional product. The original wine-producing co-operative at Vredendal dates back to 1947. Today, under the name Namaqua, it is still one of the largest wineries anywhere, delivering some 80 million litres of wine per year.)

Throughout the recent decade-or-so, development of the region as important producer was guided by a down-to-earth attitude. Unlike the pomp and circumstance that accompany wineries in the so-called prime regions, wine grape farmers (and winemakers) deal with realities on the ground here. One such is that large yields are the only sensible farming option. (And the baseline for affordable ‘supermarket’ wines. The Vredendal outfit, in 2005, had its Goiya brand as number 2 in the UK, and Namaqua as number 5.) (The situation along the Orange river is pretty much the same.)

Grape farmers will tell you that unless they can achieve a certain level of grape production, it doesn’t make sense to farm it. They’ll switch crops, if need be.

Winemakers will tell you that meticulous work in the vineyards is essential (they have a pretty nifty number of such experts up there), as is the most modern cellar equipment and the knowledge to use it effectively. (They do, and you’ll see remarkable space-age machinery at places like Spruitdrift and Stellar Organics.)

This does not mean that winemaking here is the stuff of factories. Hardly so, with that amount of investment in soil, talent and equipment. (There are a number of adventurous small producers in the region. And Namaqua has a special cellar-within-a-cellar called the ‘Château’ at Spruitdrift for its winemakers to play in with small barrels and selected crops. And the region is neatly on the wine tourism map as the West Coast Wine Route.)

But, drive around and talk to the farmers and you’ll get a refreshingly honest response to the problems of wine economics. Guided by reality.