Keep it real : the quest for the divine wine : the case of the Swartland Independent Producers

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‘Keep It Real’. The quest for the divine wine: the case of the Swartland

Independent Producers

Dido N. Voorma

September 2015

MA Thesis / Cultural and Social Anthropology Dido N. Voorma / 6042619 /didovoorma@gmail.com 9 September 2015

Supervisor: Dr. Milena Veenis

Second reader: Prof. Dr. Matthijs van der Port Third reader: Dr. Alex Strating

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‘

Keep It Real’

The quest for the divine wine: the case of the Swartland Independent Producers

MA Thesis / Cultural and Social Anthropology

Dido N. Voorma / 6042619 /didovoorma@gmail.com 8 september 2015

Supervisor: Dr. Milena Veenis

Second reader: Prof. Dr. Matthijs van der Port Third reader: Dr. Alex Strating

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4 To all Swartland Independent Producers and especially Johan and Diana Simons from Fynbos Estate/Dragonridge Winery in the Paardeberg, South Africa

In friendship and gratitude

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wine can of their wits the wise beguile, make the sage frolic, and the serious smile (Homer quoted in Taber 2005: 57).

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Abstract

The Swartland Independent Producers (SIP) united five years ago, born from the annual wine tasting festival called the Swartland Revolution. These producers are the first to put their foot down in the Swartland, South Africa, and produce wine independently instead of the bulk production that characterized the history of Swartland. These independent producers became hugely popular among wine fans and are considered among the most interesting wine regions in the world today. My goal in this thesis is to find out how and why this new wine collective of 25 winemakers has such success and sells out their wines, most for a considerable amount of money.

By demonstrating how SIP wine is attributed with the notion of terroir I will argue that the product has been taken out of its commodity shape, and made singular instead. This process of

singularization can lead to a more ‘real’ experience of wine; one that fits in the current consumer

trend of consuming authentically produced food- and wine products. People are looking for a ‘higher’ or more ‘real’ experience of food and wine, and the SIP provides exactly this. By seeing wine as something ‘higher’ than a mere commodity, room is created for a new form of religiosity, in which terroir seems to become a truth-parameter for producers, as well as for consumers.

By ‘going native’ as a wine intern I spent more than six months in the field and came to know most of the Independent Producers. I focused on their point of view, so all data is based represents the way the SIP producers present themselves and play into the consumer’s quest for the ‘divine spark’.

Keywords: wine, authenticity, de-commoditization, singularization, consumption, new religiosity

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8 MAPS

Overview of the wine regions of South Africa. Light blue is the Swartland, the arrow indicates Paardeberg, the location of my internshi

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Prologue: How I lost my heart to the Swartland

It is just more real, you know … (Karien Rall)

This is what Karien Rall said to conclude her husband’s story, and she looked at me like I would understand what she meant. ‘It’ stands for the Swartland, and I was nodding heavily while answering ‘yes, I understand’ – and I did. The Swartland is one of the newest and – to my (wine geek) opinion – most interesting wine regions in the world. And yes, for me the Swartland wines are a ‘real’ experience; these wines display how wonderful wine can taste.

It all started at the Swartland Revolution, an annual wine festival in November organized by the founders of the group I’ve been studying, the Swartland Independent Producers (SIP): Eben Sadie (Sadie Family Wines), Callie Leow (Porseleinberg), Andrea and Chris Mullineux (Mullineux & Leeu Family Wines) and Adi Badenhorst (AA Badenhorst Family Wines). Not only did I attend the original and interesting wine seminars, I drank excellent wines and met a lot of new people – all of which were winemakers. I felt a strong sense of brotherhood and friendship, something I had never experienced before and appreciated all the more for it – obviously stimulated by the amount of alcohol I consumed. The second day of the festival it suddenly became clear to me that if I wanted to fulfil my dream of becoming a winemaker, I should start as soon as possible.

I was inspired by this Swartland style of winemaking: minimum interference with nature, wild yeast fermentations, whole bunch pressing; all style choices that result in their delicious wines. The first version of this thesis still abounded in such opinions and clouded perceptions. I was actually using my informant’s statements as the only proof in my research, which consisted little more than a description of the special style of winemaking, instead of analysing my data and finding out why these people say what they say, and do what they do - and why this attracts so many people to consume their wines, including myself.

I made a decision: I went back to the field and started my first harvest as an intern at Dragonridge Winery in the Swartland, one of the 25 wineries of the SIP; I went ‘native’ again for another four months. This time around, I was able to retain my anthropological perspective around all these producers. In this period, I actually really befriended most young winemakers.

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12 Again, I attended and enjoyed a lot of braais, South African barbecues; again, I drank lots and lots of excellent wine. It remained a challenge not to fully agree with the perceptions of these young and talented people, but eventually I realised that their success within such a short time, is quite remarkable. What is it that makes SIP wine that popular, throughout the world?

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Introduction: putting Swartland on the map

Swartland Independent Producers (SIP) caught my attention because they are first generation winemakers and because they are the first independent producers in the Swartland. The Swartland used to be exclusively known for bulk wine production; large corporations who bought from all Swartland grape farmers (for a low price), mixed the grapes and sold the wine in bulk overseas.1

Five years ago, this changed. Five winemakers; Andrea and Chris Mullineux, Eben Sadie, Adi Badenhorst and Callie Leow, started a wine tasting called ‘the Swartland Revolution’. This is now an annual festival organised by these five winemakers, to introduce the people of South Africa (and the rest of the world) to their wines, made in the Swartland. As a result, the movement of the Swartland Independent Producers was born:

People in Cape Town thought we were 4,5 hours away. And people were all about

Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and they thought the Swartland is just bulk wine. But overseas we were getting amazing publicity. Yet, locally, people didn’t know who we were. So we decided to start the Revolution. So yeah we started the Revolution first and then the SIP was born from that. (Andrea Mullineux)

As Andrea Mullineux makes clear, the SIP was created from the festival The Revolution. The new organisation made rules in order to create ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ Swartland wine. These rules were named ‘values’, and are written down in the SIP-Manifesto.2_{In order to be part of the SIP,} every producer is obliged to adhere to these values. The following sections will describe these values, and how the SIP is different from the established wine regions such as Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and Constantia. First, I will show the ‘authentic’ nature of the SIP-Manifesto; and secondly, I will outline SIP’s emphasis on terroir, third, I will end the introduction with a

validation of my research, also briefly discussing my methods.

1_{This is all a resonation from the time that the Ko-operatiewe Wijnbouwers Vereniging van Zuid-Afrika (KWV), formed in 1918.}

The KWV ruled on every aspect of the wine industry until the mid-1990s. Their goal was to protect the wine farmers and to regulate a stable growth of the industry ‘to direct, control and regulate the sale and disposal by its members of their produce, being that of the grape, as shall secure or tend to secure for them a continuously adequate return for such produce’ (Kench et all 1983:34), but in turn created big issues of overproduction. The KWV’s secured this issue by making brandy spirit of all

superfluous wine grapes. The end of the Apartheid made sure the international ban on trade with South Africa was lifted and the industry as a whole could enter the international market. From 1999 the wine sector wasn’t troubled by surplus anymore. 2_{See appendix for the Manifesto.}

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14 The authentic nature of the SIP manifesto

As Adi Badenhorst explains below, starting the SIP wasn’t easy; their style of winemaking resembles a philosophy; that is difficult to pin down in ‘rules’:

You talk free around your own fucking braai. And then you want to form an organization, then you have to put those philosophical thoughts into fucking black and white. And it’s not easy. If you take a philosophical thing and you put it into words, then it becomes quite difficult because it gets set in stone. I mean it’s more like a producer forum, I think. I think it is

important when people taste a wine and it has the Swartland Independent sticker on it, they know these guys, these producers think in a certain way. That they consider everything. That they don’t just focus on the process. So people realise that these bunch of guys – there are some big producers like ourselves, we do 100.000 bottles or more, and some guys only produce 5000 bottles but all these producers get together regularly and they fucking consider what goes into the bottle, they consider their approach. I think that’s more important. (Adi Badenhorst)

So, for Adi Badenhorst it is important that people know that SIP winemakers think in a certain way about making wine. Wine with a SIP stamp communicates that these winemakers don’t mass-produce their wines, but instead, have a certain ‘philosophy’ to create an ‘authentic’ wine.

The concept of authenticity will be discussed, but I will mainly use concept in order to sketch out a contrast between ‘authentically’ produced wines and ‘mass-produced’ wines; or, in other words, the contrast between wineries that work in a natural way versus

industrialized/mechanized wineries. The SIP-Manifesto contains rules or values that ask

producers to work as natural as possible in the vineyard, as well as in the cellar. Andrea Mullineux explains:

In South Africa it is too easy to make wine, you can plant anything everywhere, and there are no vinification rules, no viticultural rules.3_{And we felt that was one of the reasons} why maybe South Africa hasn’t made as much of an impact overseas as other countries. There is no real definition of what the country stood for. We decided to make more rules for the Swartland, that’s how SIP started. (Andrea Mullineux)

As explained above, these rules Andrea Mullineux mentioned are the values written down in the Manifesto, created because of a general ‘lack’ of rules in South African wine legislation. By creating these ‘rules’, the Swartland is a ‘new’ wine region, sharply contrasting other wine regions and therefore interesting to study.

The values in the SIP-Manifesto need to be followed by every SIP winemaker. First, the Manifesto states that all SIP wines, need to be produced naturally: no addition of yeast, yeast

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15 supplement, no acidity manipulation, no addition of tannins, no chemical fining, no water

dilution and no reverse osmosis.4_{Secondly, the SIP winemakers are also confined to use less than} 25% new oak as a component, because according to the Manifesto, the use of oak masks the expression of the wine.5_{Furthermore, there are certain varietals that have to be used for at least} 90% of a wine, corresponding to the soil and the climate.6_{It also states that all wines need to be} bottled in a Base Weight Bottle, or a so-called Burgundy shape bottle.7_{Because a lot of Swartland} vineyards are busy converting to organic or biodynamic methods, the Manifesto states it is too early to start regulating farming methods, but it does recommend that the vineyards are farmed on sustainable principles; no irrigation to increase crop levels; no use of chemical nutrients in the vineyards and a high priority on bush vines in the land.8_{Finally, all SIP wines need to be}

produced, aged and bottled in the region. All winemakers that produce wine according to the SIP values are a member, and get a label of origin sticker to put on their bottle.9

Next to this, SIP winemakers unite at least three times a year, in so-called SIP meetings. I joined one, right after harvest.10_{All members were asked to bring samples of wine from the 2015} harvest, either a well succeeded or a troubled one. The meeting was held in the cellar of Callie Leow, on a beautiful farm named after and situated on the Porseleinberg. A long table was placed inside his cellar, with spittoons and glasses ready. Everybody had to tell their own story about their wines. First all white wines were put on the table. When it was my turn, I described our Viognier of Dragonridge Winery, which had been picked relatively early, but had fermented into 16,5% alcohol: an extremely high percentage.11_{Immediately afterwards, all winemakers began} discussing how this could have happened. We concluded that it was either a fault of the lab, or we had an abnormal conversion rate in our cellar, and very active yeasts.12_{At first, I was nervous} to tell 25 experienced winemakers about this problem, but they made me feel comfortable by

4_{For the fermentation to start, yeast needs to present. Yeast is all around us, also to be found on grapes in the vineyard. One}

could also choose to work with commercial yeast, but this skips a whole lot of yeast strains that each give flavour to the wine. No acidity manipulation means the prohibition of adding of acid. The same goes for the addition of tannins, naturally present in the skins and stems of the grape. Fining means clarifying the wine, for which no chemical may be used (we used whipped egg whites to clarify our white wines). Also the adding of water is strictly forbidden, as this is sometimes used in order to enhance the production amount, but logically takes away flavour. Reverse osmosis is a technique winemakers can use to reduce alcohol by filtering a part of the wine through a very tight filter. This is added back to the bigger batch of wine, reducing the alcohol but also reducing flavour.

5_{Wine is generally stored in oak barrels, or barriques. Average barrels are either 225 liters or 300 liters. Many of the oak vats that}

are used are three years or older. New oak barrels tend to add a ‘vanilla’ flavour to the wine. Some SIP producers use wooden ‘foudres’ instead, 5000 liter wooden casks that last a long time. I’ve also noticed a lot of concrete being used in the SIP cellars.

6_{Not every grape can grow anywhere. There is a correspondence between the DNA of the grape and the climate and soil on}

which it grows.

7_{Burgundy shaped is a tall bottle with sloping shoulders.}

8_{Bush vines are a type of vines that are not trained with wires or other systems of support and looks like a small bush. They are}

quite impossible to machine harvest, so the emphasis on bush vines already implies a turn away from mechanical harvest methods. For example, appendix image 9.

9_{See appendix image 2.} 10_{See appendix image 3.}

11_{We picked the grapes at 23,5 balling (the measurement for sugar). With a normal conversion rate this should result in}

approximately 14% alcohol.

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16 taking me seriously. And after a while the atmosphere actually became rather joyful, as nobody spat out his or her zips of the in total sixty different wines that were up for taste. Afterwards, we drank the remaining bottles and enjoyed delicious pulled-pork braai-brooikies (bread rolls with pork) grilled by Callie Leow.

By coming together, such as the SIP meeting mentioned above, information is shared and people are willing to do an effort in helping one another in making ‘authentic’ wine. SIP co-founder Callie Leow describes their motive for uniting:

[We came up with the Manifesto] not to control, but just to have parameters. Then it’s more of an association, so there are rules. It is difficult to have something serious when there are no rules. When everybody can just say yes. [...] The reason why we’ve done the Independent because everybody is doing the same stuff, so it’s just all work together. Like the French; none of them want to work together. The French they don’t ever fucking braai with their neighbours. They are terrible, the French. We are better, we can have braais together, and have parties together. (Callie Leow)

As Callie demonstrates, the SIP-Manifesto was created in order to have something ‘serious’, otherwise everybody could easily say that they were doing something ‘new’. As members of the SIP, following the values in the Manifesto, winemakers can say they belong to this group, and start to make a difference together in South Africa. These wine producers belong to a community that shares information, knowledge and even braais. However, these prerequisites for creating an ‘authentic’ wine, plus the coming-together, are not the only differences between SIP and other South African wine regions: during my fieldwork I sensed an almost religious devotion to the concept of terroir.

SIP & Terroir

SIP winemakers are thus united by the same values, by sharing information, but above all in their appreciation of concept of terroir. Terroir entails the given natural characteristics of the area (soil, slope, climate) and the human practices of cultivation. I will elaborate upon the concept of terroir in the next chapter and throughout the thesis. Adi Badenhorst explains his notion of terroir in the following quote:

To get that regionality, it is an important thing you know, for people try to sell wine. I suppose at the end of the day they want to sell a bit of wine. Ehm, but, with the whole selling of wine and the regionality those things will come after we got everything right, you know? You can’t start with things like that. You can’t start with try to impose

regionality and then hope the wine fucking sells. It is a basic thing. We get together, make wine, swap our vineyards, we share grapes, taste each other wines. (Adi Badenhorst)

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17 First, he states how important it is to emphasize the region’s qualities in order to become

successful in selling wine, but also by ‘getting things’ right, pointing to human practices: explaining his idea of terroir. For Adi, SIP is an organisation that not only sprouted from a philosophical point of view, but also as a means to form a (commercial) collective that puts Swartland on the map by focussing on local produces or ‘regionality’. He continues explaining how all winemakers are concerned with producing a ‘real’ wine that represents the terroir of the Swartland:

It’s just how we like to make wine […]. And these things all start off with a mutual respect, very important, respect for the people and their wines and then we just got talking, man. We think it is important for an area to express what it can express. The Swartland can have a big impact, the terroir itself can have a big impact on the wines, but in order to do that you need to plant certain varietals, on top of that you need to make wines that are more interesting. I don’t know how do you do that? Maybe move a little away from the mainstream, to make wines that are more interesting. So obviously the whole thing that upsets a lot of people is: you know you can use certain varietals, we said these are the right ones, it’s a dynamic thing not set in stone but these are the varietals that are recommended for the Swartland. So immediately that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. We say maybe it’s better to not filter your wine, or not to add acid and that also make people feel uncomfortable, but if you’ve been doing that then it is comforting. (Adi Badenhorst)

For Adi Badenhorst, the SIP started as an idea between five friends who had philosophical thoughts about winemaking. The above quote shows how comfort can be found, in producing a wine while working together, following the SIP-Manifesto values.

However, for winemakers who never worked like this before, it can be challenging and therefore uncomfortable, quoting Adi. For instance, winemaker Sheree from Wildehurst Winery expressed her concerns about the SIP values. She recently finished her Winemaking & Viticulture study and learned that one could always add acid when grapes are harvested overripe. Now, as a SIP winemaker, she can’t add acid and needs to make sure to harvest the grapes on time. If she harvests too late, the grapes are high in sugar and low in acid, and risk resulting in a ‘weak’, ‘flabby’ wine. By not being able to add acid, SIP winemakers are pushed to spend more time in the vineyard, monitoring the vines and testing grapes.

These SIP values are thus pushing the boundaries in the world of wine; some people might get uncomfortable by them, however, to the founder’s opinion and my own, it will yield the most flavoursome wine. The Swartland Independent Producers are a new group of

winemakers, who make wine in a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ way. The SIP distinguish themselves from the other wine regions through their winemaking rules or the SIP-Manifesto values; through sharing information and working together; and by their notion of terroir:

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18 [We have] a lot of things in common, a like-mindedness, we all view the same thing, we essentially believe in all core values. Some more in extreme wise, others in less

extreme wise. But at least we all bound in the fact that we believe. We believe in the real

wine. (Eben Sadie)

In this quote, Eben Sadie shows an almost religious dedication to wine and the production thereof. SIP members believe. They believe in the realness of their product. Dedicating their lives to the same content and goal, they form a community of believers. They organize themselves around the creation of a product, a product that far surpasses the ordinary bottle most people thoughtlessly buy in the supermarket. Their values are laid down in the Manifesto, and celebrated in their annual festival the Swartland Revolution. From the festival the Revolution, the SIP now provides a producer platform for winemakers who ‘believe’ that the SIP-Manifesto values form the foundation for ‘real’ wine, in which the region’s qualities are respected, by treating the vineyards in the best way possible, and the wine is not spoiled by addition of (for instance) chemicals.

Validating my research

Anthropologists have long been interested in food; already in 1888 Garrick Malley published an article in American Anthropologist called ‘Manners and Meals’ (Mintz&DuBois 2002: 100). Likewise, Franz Boas’ (1921) exhaustive treatment of Kwakiutl salmon recipes is an example of early work in the anthropology of food (ibid.; Black&Ulin 2013: 2). In a more recent era, Claude Levi Strauss (1965) and Mary Douglas (1987) also made important contributions, not only to food, but also the role that alcohol played in societies (Mintz&Dubois 2002: 100). In the last couple of decades however, there has been a steady increase in the scale of food literature in anthropology (ibid.:111), also focussing on the growing popularity of ‘organic’ or ‘authentic’ food and drinks nowadays in societies in the Global North (Black&Ulin 2013:4).13

According to Eriksen (2010), doing fieldwork ‘at home’ depends on the anthropologist professional skills: in a familiar setting, one has the ability of mastering the language and cultural conventions better than in a culturally distant place (Eriksen 2010: 34). In my case, I was capable of asking questions about wine and winemaking that exceeded the superficiality of everyday conversation, due to my knowledge of the product. But, as Eriksen argues, knowing much can also have the negative result of taking too much for granted, and one could risk ‘homeblindness’ (ibid.), which I experienced: the first three months of fieldwork I was ‘blinded’ by my data,

13_{I will use the word ‘Global North’ to indicate the ‘Western’ industrialized capitalist societies, because to my opinion the use of}

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19 because I idolized these winemakers. I found their knowledge of wine was so detailed that I developed a desire to become a winemaker, and instead of making my research data deductive, I reproduced everything my informants said. However, upon returning to the field for another four months, I managed to zigzag between inductive and deductive modes; I watched and wondered, collected information about what people said and did, all the while thinking theoretically about what I encountered.

During the research it came to my attention that the majority of people still think the discipline of anthropology solely concentrates on studying remote societies on far away islands; whenever I told people that wine was the subject of my research, people would react surprised to wine as an area of academic scholarship. Most people associate wine and alcohol primarily with pleasure and therefore unworthy of academic attention.

However, as I will demonstrate here, the enjoyment of consuming/producing wine can lead to an almost spiritual experience – experiences that are able to shape one’s life, and therefore quite appealing to study. Van der Port (2004) and Lindholm (2002) pictured how, recently, many anthropologists have been busy focussing on the ‘constructedness’ of life worlds of people, emphasizing the make-belief rather than to study the act of believing itself (Van der Port 2004:10). If something is regarded as ‘authentic’, anthropologists tend to fall back on explaining this feeling of authenticity as a mere construct, or as something invented (ibid.:8). But, instead, we should study these processes of giving meaning, actually by going back to old research agenda’s of, for instance, Durkheim, and his notion of the Sacred (1912), in which experiences with a higher power are located, on which I will elaborate more in the final chapter.

According to Van der Port (2004), what needs to be studied and analysed are the techniques and resources people have at their disposal to believe, in the sense of taking things to be true (ibid.:10). If we can find out what ‘sacredness’ means for us today, in the Global North, outside of institutionalized religion, we can find out what is most important for people in their lives. Only then we can find out what moves us in the world of today, and why. For me, this was an important insight during my fieldwork and the writing of my thesis. By understanding how these winemakers thought about wine, and organized their whole lives around the product, I sensed such devotion, that it couldn’t – and shouldn’t – remain unstudied.

After spending more than six months in the field, I managed to conduct nine official interviews, but gathered a lot of data during wine tastings, parties and braais. The Swartland Independent Producers only united five years ago, and the sales of all individual Swartland producers since then has grown incredibly – not to mention the five founders, whose wines sell out upon release. Further of interest: SIP wines can be considered expensive: ranging from 15 till 100 euro’s a

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20 bottle. It should be clear that these winemakers are doing something right. In this thesis I want to research why the SIP wines became so popular. Why do their wines attract so many people; and what is it, that makes their wines so incredibly appealing? Step by step, I want to work towards the argument that the SIP producers are unconsciously playing into the mind-set of present-day consumers, who are longing for a ‘divine spark’; and it is exactly this that is provided by the SIP.

In the following, second chapter I will explore how wine can be experienced as something ‘aesthetic’, and how it consequently transcends its commodity status, by becoming

singular. I will present my own findings on what role terroir plays in the making of SIP wine. From

this, I can show how wine is not only singularized, but room is created for a more ‘real’ or ‘true’ experience of wine. The third chapter will shed light on the concept of authenticity, and focuses on the growing popularity of presumed ‘authentic’ food and drinks in contemporary consumption society of the Global North. How come we are searching for ‘real’ food and wine products with a focus on locality and craftsmanship? In the final chapter I will try to lay bare how the SIP can be viewed as ‘authentic’ in the eyes of wine consumers. By focussing on the fact that SIP only uses minimal forms of marketing, I will show that there has to be something ‘else’, that attracts these consumers.

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2.

The aesthetics of wine: how wine can have a ‘soul’

My encounter with a bottle of Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses 1959 truly was an aesthetic experience. I knew nothing about wine at the time, but in that glass I could perceive not only a huge amount of sensual pleasure, but the sense that in this glass was history, geography, and the human hand in some form. The beauty in that wine lit the flame for a lifetime’s fascination with wine for me. (Jancis Robinson)14

Jancis Robinson, one of the most influential wine writers of today, describes her experience of wine as aesthetic object. She seems to become almost ‘enchanted’ by this bottle of wine; how she could experience beauty, history, geography and the human hand, solely by taking a sip from the glass. The fact that she is able to experience this feeling by drinking a glass of wine implies that wine can be considered something ‘more’ than just a product. This chapter will explore the possibilities of experiencing wine as something aesthetic, as something ‘higher’ than a regular product.

This chapter starts with a diary fragment of the harvest period in the Swartland, in which I was confronted with a feeling of wine being a ‘timeless’ product. Subsequently, I discuss how wine can be seen as something ‘aesthetic’. After this, I will explain the concept ‘commodity’, as well as singularitzation. Next, I will shed light on how SIP’s notion of terroir can give wine a ‘soul’, ultimately singularizing it. At last, I will explain Ubuntu, and why this is an important aspect of making wine in the Swartland.

A farmer in Swartland

Diary 10-02-2015

It is 6.30 am and I don’t see a thing. The first rays of sun shine vigorously over the Paardeberg as I drive towards them. I have no clue whether I’m driving on the dirt road or next to it, but it feels good and I don’t hear any protesting noises in the back. I’m driving the bakkie, a squeaky old Isuzu pick-up truck, which has driven over 400.000 k’s. It has a reliable, thrusting Diesel engine that comforts the drive. Twice a year, the exhaust pipe vibrates off and it feels like you’re driving

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22 a Harley. The back of the bakkie is filled with harvesters: seven guys I just picked up from the industry town Malmesbury, or as they like to call it ‘Mama’s Bay’.

I push my foot down harder on to the gas pedal and accelerate. My feet are comfortably tucked away in the muddy winemakers boots that I bought at the Agrimark. The sun turns away and I see that the road is moving upwards. My left hand is put carelessly onto the passenger seat next to me, while the wind is striking through my long hair. I am a farmer, in the Swartland, South Africa.

Far away a harvesting machine is approaching, followed by a cloud of dust. I move the car towards the left while I try to avoid the biggest holes in the road. In the back I see the men talking to each other, seeming quite relaxed and moving along to the actions of my steering. The road becomes narrow and when we pass the harvesting machine, my vision is blurred again. Five seconds later the curtain of dust opens up again and I spot two women carrying heavy bags, eagerly putting their thumbs up in the air. Immediately I stop the car, so the women can jump in the back.

We are driving into the Joubertskloof and slowly approach the end where two mountains rise majestically, in between them a saddle point. Left is Dragonridge, and as the name implies it looks like the back of a Dragon. On the right is Sonkop, the highest peak in this kloof of the

Paardeberg. The women tap the window to indicate that I should stop to drop them off. Now

there is only 2 k’s left before we drive onto the courtyard of Fynbos Estate. When we arrive, my boyfriend comes running towards me telling me that the first push-downs for the day are done, and we’re about to start the first pump over.15_{A morning like so many mornings in the harvest period} in the Swartland: starting before sunrise and working until sunset. In one hour the first batch of grapes will come in, freshly yielded from the land, ready to be turned into wine. It keeps on going but it never gets boring. We are at the beginning of a timeless product.

Wine and aesthetics

For many people (including myself) wine is an aesthetic experience. This means that the

enjoyment of wine can exceed the ‘superficiality’ of everyday life; one can sense a kind a ‘beauty’ in aesthetic objects that asks for certain knowledge of the contextual basis of the object

(Burnham&Skilleas 2012). One could see that wine has always been a ‘special’ object enclosed with something ‘ungraspable’, because of its presence in traditions traced back all the way to

15_{With push downs I mean literally ‘pushing down’ the skins of the grapes during maceration. In our case at Dragonridge Winery,}

we destemmed-crushed and kept the red grapes in blue bins. The juice slowly disappears to the bottom, and the top layer becomes dry. By keeping it wet by pushing it down three times a day, the ‘cap’ remains wet and in this way enough colour and tannins can be extracted. Pump over is the transferring of wine from one tank to the other. When one tanked is pumped empty, the ‘gross lees’ or dead yeast cells remain, which in our case we throw out. In bigger wineries these dead yeast cells are filtered from the liquid, and the liquid is added back into the wine.

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23 mythology (wine god Bacchus), religion (drinking the blood of Jesus) and its role throughout history, in poetry, songs and literature (Harvey 2004:100).

According to wine writers Burnham and Skilleas (2012), in their book The aesthetics of wine, wine can, just like art, recall aesthetic notions, in which one can consider ‘beauty’ as one of its characteristics. Wines are objects of taste, in the aesthetic as well as in the sensory sense, partly because they are far more complex and come in much greater variety than most other

consumables; consequently having a far more advanced level of systematic tasting than any other beverage (Bach 2003:388; Burnham&Skilleas 2012). Burnham& Skilleas argue that aesthetic attributes emerge from the experience of the object by the subject who brings with him or her knowledge, know-how and experience (Burnham&Skilleas 2012). I agree that learning to recognize and appreciate wine’s flavours contributes to an aesthetic experience of wine, or, one could dare to say: a ‘higher’ experience of wine.

For instance, drinking wine with the winemakers in the Swartland was always a special occasion, and every time it was preceded by a little ‘ritual’: everybody brought at least two or three bottles of wine with them to a party or braai, and most of the time special ones; sometimes made by themselves, sometimes found in an old cellar. Always wine worth a try and always submitted to a serious tasting, in which all aspects were discussed. Together we tried to understand the wines, although it sometimes felt as if we were legitimizing the amount of alcohol we

consumed. Nevertheless, it was more than that: we were attaching meaning to the product. The tasting went as following:

First of all, the wine is poured into the glass. One immediately looks at the colour and texture, and start swirling it. I noticed that Stompie (winemaker Johan Meyer of JH Meyer Wines) has his own way of swirling the wine in the glass, stopping the swirl by pulling the glass down, but everybody seems to have their own little way.16_{The next step is to look at the texture: is the} wine teary, is it fatty, does it stick to the glass? If so, this can be an indicator of high alcohol or a fat body.17_{What does the colour look like? Is it see-through or dense? What follows is to smell} the wine and taste. The understanding of wines, and sharing that with other people, makes it a real enjoyment. To me, this little ‘ritual’ before every glass of wine contributes to the whole process of appreciation, attributing to the aesthetic experience of drinking wine.18

16_{By swirling the wine in the glass you allow oxygen into the wine, which causes the wine to open up and this enhances the}

development of aromas.

17_{With body the texture of the wine is meant. You can compare the texture of wine with the consistency of low-fat milk, fat milk}

or cream.

18_{Obviously, these tasting sessions led to a lot of fun parties, and after six glasses of wine it became harder and harder to really}

taste the wines, but I kept on seeing other winemakers drinking very thoughtfully; they kept on sticking their noses into the glass, while I was too tipsy already to even remember what was in my glass at that moment.

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24 This process of understanding wine is not only apparent among winemakers in the

Swartland. The fact that it is possible to understand the product and that one can follow wine courses in order to do so, gives wine an aura of something greater: one would never follow classes to come to understand peanut butter or washing powder. And it is true, the more I learn in classes such as the WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust),the more able I become to discover aroma’s that are specifically tied to a region.19_{The ‘chalky’ minerality of}

Puligny-Montrachet (Bourgogne) for instance, is one that you can learn to recognize. To come to know about savoir-faire of specific wine regions, by studying and drinking, one can really understand how

flavours can result from the terroir of a specific region, which I will clarify below. This

understanding – which requires serious effort and a considerable amount of money – contributes to an aesthetic experience of wine. To be able to understand a wine, and to experience its ‘depth’ through taste, makes wine therefore a ‘special’ commodity. But what is exactly meant with a ‘commodity’ and how do we determinate its meanings?

The singularization of wine

Being able to obtain knowledge about the product of wine, spend money in order to learn how to really appreciate it, understand it and become a connoisseur; makes it no wonder that Bourdieu incorporated wine in his famous work Distinction (1984). To have the ability to know about wine, or to have knowledge, seems to embody cultural capital, as part of an expression of class. Being able to distinguish the quality wine from the table wine seems to enforce social boundaries: ‘it distinguishes in an essential way, since taste is the basis of all that one has – people and things – and all that one is for others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others (Bourdieu 1984: 56).This social marker derives out of the fact that the experience of French wine demands the consumer to have certain knowledge about the product beforehand, as most of the time the grape varietals aren’t mentioned on French wine bottles. When encountering a red wine from

Pommard, connoisseurs immediately know that this wine is from Bourgogne, and made from the grape

Pinot Noir. Bourdieu argues that an essential part of the appreciation of wine seems to possess this knowledge, and therefore ‘taste’ (Bourdieu 1984).

Although this theory is based on the assumption that wine is something ‘more’ than a regular product, I find Bourdieu’s analysis rather limited. To my opinion, consumption of wine is much more than merely status enhancement. As James Carrier (1990) has put it: ‘we don’t parade objects up and down in front of some anonymous mass in assertion of status (Carrier 1990: 580). According to Carrier, instead, we use objects to experience something else. By de-commodifying

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25 objects, we can make them our own; hence, we can experience these objects as something other than status, we can attach meaning to them. Wine is a perfect example of how an object can be ascribed with multiple meanings, as I will demonstrate below.

So, what is exactly an object to begin with? For Carrier, objects that can be bought for money are commodities (Carrier 1990: 581). These are not neutral things, but can have social lives, depending on the situation (ibid.: 581). He draws upon the theory of Kopytoff (1984) and Appadurai (1984) who re-opened the discussion among anthropologists on commodity and value; a discussion that, until then, was dominated by Marxian thought. Appadurai and Kopytoff pleaded for another vision: objects or commodities are not simply things that circulate through the impersonal economic system in exchange for money, but can have a ‘life’ on its own. One of the main fruits of both his and Kopytoff texts is the evidence that the value of the commodity can change, depending on its context and life-phase (Appadurai 1984).

Igor Kopytoff elaborates further on the ‘social life of a thing’, and argues that a

commodity not only can have a life on its own, it can move in and out of the commodity phase. Kopytoff states that a commodity is a thing that has use value that can be exchanged by a

transaction for a counterpart of an equivalent value – such as money (Kopytoff 1984: 64). In this way, everything that can be bought with money can be a commodity. In the Global North we usually take saleability to be the unmistaken indicator of the commodity status of an object (ibid: 69). But some goods that can be bought have an aura of non-saleability, implying that they have something special that sets them apart, a kind of unique and authentic status (ibid.).

Kopytoff describes this aura of a commodity as a commodity being singular. Things or objects that are normally commodities are taken out of their commodity sphere and can be

singularized. However, this isn’t a one-way process. Kopytoff shows its paradoxical working: once

a commodity is singularized, it tends to become more worthy of being collected; its singular status makes it more valuable (ibid.: 82). If an object is valuable, it acquires a price and becomes a commodity that people can buy, subsequently undermining its singularity (ibid.: 81). Kopytoff here shows two complex, intertwining forces: on the hand, a homogenous area of commodities in which an object can be exchanged for money; and on the other hand, an area of valuation or

singularization, resulting in a process of de-commodification.

An example is the paradoxical working of the art market (ibid.: 82,83). People seem to be uneasy or offended by naming a price for a Picasso painting, in the sense that art rises above the commodity status (ibid.). I sensed the same kind of uneasiness around the winemakers of the SIP; whenever I used the word ‘commodity’ in order to describe their product. They were

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26 reluctant about the usage of the word, and consequently tried to persuade me they were making anything but a commodity.

Now, we have seen how wine can be an aesthetic experience, by learning how to sense, taste, appreciate and understand the beauty it can possess. Wine can be understood, therefore becoming something ‘other’ than a regular commodity, by becoming singular. During my fieldwork I sensed such devotion to the product of wine that it not only transcended its commodity status. For the winemakers, by respecting the notion of terroir, a wine can have a ‘soul’.

Terroir and timelessness: creating a wine with ‘soul’

The concept of terroir explains the correspondence between the natural factors of a wine-growing region (soil, water, slope, climate, grapes) and the human experience (traditions of wine-growing, practices of cultivation) that supposedly give a unique character to each wine (Lindholm 2008: 83; Guy 2003: 119; Teil 2011: 491; Fourçade 2012: 525; Gade 2004: 865; Bisson et all. 2002: 696; Trubek 2008:18). Stemming from French legacy, the notion of terroir is now commonly used in the vocabulary of winemakers all over the world. To respect the terroir of an area; is to produce a wine that conceals the signature of a winemakers’ style of vinification (the choices of the

winemaker in the cellar), while at the same time, respecting the ‘natural’ taste of the soil (Barham 1997: 131): ‘the production of wine is a complex dance with nature with the goal of translating the local ecology, displaying its qualities to best advantage’ (ibid.). It requires local knowledge of the terrain, but at the same time the concept somehow remains clouded by mystique.

In her book How champagne became French, Kolleen Guy (2003) describes, how French grape farmers in Champagne increasingly linked terroir with ‘soul’. In order to protect champagne from other ‘fraudulent’ sparkling wines a connection between soil and soul was ‘invented’, and discovered in the concept of terroir. According to the winemakers of champagne – who wanted to protect their position – it was the ‘pure essence’ found in the specific terroir of the French region of Champagne that made the difference between champagne and other sparkling wines (Guy 2003). Even the devastation of French vineyards by phylloxera around 1900 couldn’t take away this ‘soul’ that, according to the French legislators, is inherent to the French ground and traditions (ibid.:119).20_{It is remarkable to witness, how, by regarding wine as a product from}

terroir – manifesting not only the natural features of the land, but also the human cultivation or

tradition – it becomes possible for wine to denote ‘purity’ and ‘soul’.

20_{Around 1900 the grape louse called phyloxera demolished almost all vineyards in the world. By replanting the vineyards on}

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27 Throughout my fieldwork I suspected many winemakers of the SIP to have a ‘deep’ connection to the land of the Swartland, as having a sense of place. An interesting example came to my attention on social media. I became Facebook friends with most (younger) winemakers and it struck me that most (if not all) of their posts were pictures of nature: farmlands, sunsets and sunrises, newly planted varietals, vineyards, or posts about animals. They seemed highly conscious of their environment and the way they treat it.21_{This corresponds to their belief in}

terroir.

During a tasting of Testalonga Wines by Craig Hawkins (part of the SIP), I inquired what his thought were on terroir:

Terroir is for me one vineyard, a single vineyard. You can get very specific. Granite is very

exposed on these vineyards; down you have the Viognier is more on clay soil, that one on a more sandy soil. And you feel it. Or I feel it. I mean I can, because I know it because I taste it.

What I found interesting was his embodied understanding of terroir, a characteristic that can be felt in wine, according to him. Talking to him about his wines and the appreciation of it, he states that:

Wine is more than that [just journalist’s picking up the wine and tasting it], it’s about the people, the farming…it is about - visiting, if you can’t come to the place, at least try to have a bit of understanding. (Craig Hawkins)

I asked what he meant by ‘understanding’, and he answered:

You need to understand the people behind it. Talk with somebody who knows it… because it needs explanation, because then you can understand why you get those flavours. That’s the important thing for the consumer, that’s why you’re here. You need to understand the people behind it. People who don’t like it, I’ve never looked into their eyes before. I’ve never met them. (Craig Hawkins)

For Craig, one needs to know the people and place behind his product. Only then it becomes possible to understand the flavours of his wines. Jurgen Gouws also pleads for understanding; he even dedicated the name of winery, Intellego Wines, to it:

Intellego is the Latin name for I understand. So, which is important when it comes to wine, it is not a product. It is not a bottle of coke that you drink now here and then tonight and it all taste the same. It’s more than that. It’s something alive and I think you also need to understand it and appreciate it where it comes from what we are trying to

21_{Back home, on Whatsapp, I asked Franziska (grape farmer and girlfriend of Jasper Wickens of the SIP) how she was doing, and}

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28 achieve a bit. So yeah, understanding makes it a lot easier to do appreciate it.’ (Jurgen Gouws)

According to Jurgen, if you buy his bottle, you don’t just buy a bottle of wine; you buy an

experience: wine is more than just a bottle of Coca-Cola. For him, for a complete appreciation of his product, you need to know where it comes from, how it’s farmed and what kind of grape is used on what kind of soil, actually explaining his understanding of terroir. By declaring his product is ‘alive’, it implicates that the product of wine not only exceeds its commodity status: it can live. Craig agrees with this point of view, and even told me that such wines he aims to make:

I’m looking for wines with a little bit of soul. (Craig Hawkins)

At the time I didn’t ask him what he meant with this, because it felt obvious to me: wines with a soul are made as naturally as possible. But on another occasion, Craig told me something, which made me understand his previous expression more clearly:

Commercial wineries have to be there; otherwise we won’t have a market. I only hate it when they name terroir. What they’re doing has nothing to do with terroir. (Craig Hawkins) Craig Hawkins reveals an interesting tension between the commercial wineries and himself as a SIP producer. Terroir can only be used in the vocabulary of winemakers who ‘care’ about the product of wine, treating the wine and vineyard with ‘respect’: thus recognizing its soul. Commercial wineries mass produce wines, add chemical constituents and pesticides in the vineyard, and have, according to Craig Hawkins, no right to use the term terroir because they don’t make a wine that is true to nature, or displays what it can display: it is hidden by chemicals.

Eben Sadie takes on a same vision, declaring how commercial wineries are making wine to standardized patterns:

You have 2 types of wine in the world today, I think, you have many but if you take the two absolute different polarities, like North and South. The one is: it doesn’t matter where the vineyard is, it doesn’t matter who’s working in the vineyard, what their

children’s name is, when it was planted, how it was farmed, the only objective is to make a 100 point wine. You know, to fit a certain taste profile, to fit a consumer index, to tick all the boxes, so you can get a 100 points so you can get a lot of money for your wine, so you can look great and the guy that buys it he feels great because he buys a 100 point wine. The fact that he paid 200 euro’s for the bottle and he don’t know what is in the bottle, don’t know… it is like a false society where the winemaker only wants to make a 100 point wine, and to make a 100 point wine we know a wine needs to look after all these years like that: it needs to be quite dark, it needs to be quite opaque in colour, you

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29 know, needs to be lot of berries and fruit, then secondary flavours like cigars and cedar wood, pencil shavings and this and that, and the acidity must be at this point, this and that. You can actually make a wine. That’s why the word winemaker exists. Because people think they can make it. And then you get a 100 points, and the wine writer looks good because he found the wine, and the guy who is buying it for 200 dollars he feels good, and when he opens the bottle he smells the strawberries and the cherries, and the dark and opaque and cedar wood, cigar and he smells everything that is in the tasting note of the reviewer or wine writer. He feels good, so he can now see the flavour that they are talking about. So he feels it has to be a good wine. But it’s not. It’s just ‘you wanted Coca-Cola? You got Coca-Cola’. But you end up spending a lot of money cause you don’t have the concernment to understand that there are different ones out there. That the wine is not coca cola, that it is all different.

(Eben Sadie)

Eben Sadie expresses how he thinks that commercial wineries all follow the same rules: wine is seen as a commercial product that needs to fit a certain taste profile, and in this way represents nothing more than ‘business’. A ‘100 point-wine’ is a wine that is judged by Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate as the best wine possible, because it fits a certain taste profile that according to these judges are the most wanted aromas in wine.22_{Eben Sadie calls this a ‘false society’, in which} people don’t think for themselves but blindly believe in and buy those wines that Parker gives 100 points. But these commercial winemakers have all sorts of ways to fabricate a wine, or manipulate just as long as it fits this certain style of Parker. He continues and even pleads for his wines to represent something ‘deeper’:

The other wine people make, which I think are the wines we make, is the complete inverse, like in our case we don’t want to make a perfect wine, we don’t want to make a 100 point wine. We want to produce wine that first of all represents the soil of this place. The climate of this place. The people of this place. It must represent the characteristics of everything, the traditions, the history, the historical paths, all that things must be in the wine, and then whatever the wine is, we’re ok with it. And we let all these things walk in front of you, and you as winemaker you walk in the back. You close the gate, you don’t open it and walk in. You close it. Once everything is inside, you close it by putting a cork in the bottle. A completely inverse way of looking at it. Some people might think it is quite a hippie or alternative look. It just a different angle. I look at things completely different. […]

He [Sadie’s previous employer] is the most successful businessman in South Africa in wine, but nothing of his wine taste… there is no soul, they all taste like business. They are all just correct you know. Most winemakers want to make a great wine. For me, I don’t want to make the best wine in the world. That was never my objective. (Eben Sadie) For Eben Sadie, wine should show the people of a place, the traditions, and the history. Wine should represent all those values, to become a ‘real’ wine. By making sure the notion of terroir is

22_{Robert Parker is one of the most influential wine critics in today’s wine world. He rates wines on a 100-point scale and has a}

very obvious stylistic preference: he gives high ratings to big red wines with a high usage of oak. See discussion for elaboration on the fact that Eben Sadie recently scored 95 points for his wine.

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30 recognized – by respecting the natural features of thee land – a wine can have a ‘soul’; when it represents a place with people, traditions and history a wine can therefore be considered

‘timeless’: as it is the ‘soul’ that is believed to live on, after a person dies or, in this case, a bottle is drank.

So for now, we have seen how the SIP winemakers view the notion of terroir, and how by respecting this notion, wine can posses a ‘soul’, ultimately singularized, by becoming ‘timeless’. By respecting the terroir, one should, firstly, honour the natural characteristics of the region such as the soil and the surroundings, by having a sense of place; second, by obtaining knowledge on the region one can come to understand the flavours these wines produce; and third, representing the people, history and traditions in their wine. Now the following question arises; how does one make sure a wine can represent people, history and traditions? For winemaker Eben Sadie, this is expressed in the concept of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu in wine: representing people, history and traditions

When talking about the people and history of South Africa, one tends to immediately think of the Apartheid, a time that fractured South African society in a horrible way. Nowadays, South

African people still find it hard to see their society as harmonious; the diversity of people is extreme, and mutual disagreement on all sorts of topics still dominates South African society.

Anthropologist in African Studies Van Binsbergen (2001) states that the post-apartheid stage of South African society today is not only a highly complex situation, rife with

contradictions, but also a traumatised society (van Binsbergen 2001: 53). To be able to confront these contradictions and traumas, the already existing African concept of Ubuntu was ‘reinvented’, in order to provide a new source of meaning and transformation (ibid.:54). The concept implies humanness, mutual caring and respect (ibid.). Eben Sadie hopes to express this notion of Ubuntu through his wines:

So we build houses in the old way, we make wines in the African way. I understand Burgundy way, and I understand the Bordeaux way, the Piedmontese way, the Alsatian way, the Loire way, the Jura way, I studied all these different things. But the biggest compliment I could ever receive is: Eben really made good Swartland wine. He understood this place. He was a great African. I don’t want to hear sophisticated, you want to hear that he understood a little bit the heart of Africa and we’ve got a thing we call a Ubuntu, which you can google, that thing of African Ubuntu is what we need in our wines. Our wines should also not taste as the most elegant Pinot Noir, it must be a little bit rough, a little bit tough, sensual, and depth, amazing depth. Because that’s this country. (Eben Sadie)

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31 For Eben Sadie, letting his wines ‘speak’ Ubuntu, is the ultimate way of representing his country: expressing its people, traditions and history. The labels of Eben Sadie’s wine brand Sequillo display this. Every year a new label is designed to transfer a message to consumers; every vintage has a different story that he, as a winemaker in South Africa, wants to share. The label of Sequillo white 2012, found on its website, is described as follows:23

We often want to associate wine with good moments and good news, but the wine world is a people world and the White 2012 was born in a year of political and economical unrest in its land - signs that our capitalist model is probably failing us. The Sequillo project wants to challenge the obvious and search for the gist of things, so we are sending this wine out with an illustration, open for interpretation, of the grower/labourer and vine with their love for the land in the midst of the uncertain economy and the marching of the masses.24

This political unrest is based upon the re-election of president Zuma, keeping him in power until 2019, even after his exposure of spending over 28 million dollars of the state’s money on

protection measure of his house in Kwazulu-Natal. Also, in 2012, the South African state responded in a brutal way to the demonstration of mineworkers, resulting in the death of 34 persons. On top of that, in 2012, South Africa was considered to have the world’s biggest HIV/aids population and an unemployment rate of 25% to 40%.25

The Sequillo label designed to tell this story shows the fractured contemporary South African society, but at the same time pleads for ‘love’ for the land and has an ‘open’ message. It represents Ubuntu. It displays the rough edges that characterize South Africa’s society today, but at the same time sends out a message of hope. Entering the website the following motto is shown: ‘Sequillo, caretakers of terroir’. Eben Sadie thus not only pleads to express the locality of South Africa, he pleads to represent contemporary African society in his wines, in ‘taking care of

terroir’. These wines become timeless, and should be remembered as images of South African’s

society today: a little rough, tough, but also sensual and with amazing depth, to quote Eben Sadie. As a winemaker, in this way, he becomes part of something bigger; something that can bring comfort, gives meaning and unites.

In sum, wine can be an aesthetic experience, for it has a certain ‘depth’ for people to experience in its taste; it can develop different aroma’s on different soils, aroma’s one can learn to

‘understand’, by taking for instance wine courses. Because of this, wine is not considered just a product; it exceeds its commodity status by becoming singular. For the winemakers, the product

23_{See appendix image 4 for a picture of the label.} 24_{www.sequillo.com/labels/(28-6-2015)}

25_{Alex Perry, Time, 18-12-2012 http://world.time.com/2012/12/18/more-of-the-same-in-south-africa-as-anc-re-elects-zuma}

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32 of wine becomes ultimately singularized; wine can be even ascribed with a ‘soul’. In order to obtain this ‘soul’, wine should not only represent the natural characteristics by a sense of place, but also, it should speak Ubuntu; all coming together in respecting the notion of terroir. In this way room is created for a higher experience of wine; it paves the way to experience wine as all

encompassing, or as something sacred.

For the SIP winemakers, terroir is a red thread through the SIP-Manifesto; all values are based on creating a wine true to itself, displaying nature by not adding any constituents. Like this, it becomes a product that people can be eager for to experience. And indeed, for this kind of produce, which resembles such closeness to nature, is a big demand.

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33

3.

The Search for a ‘Divine Spark’

(Lindholm 2002:336)

When I asked Donovan Rall (winemaker of Rall Wines, part of the SIP) about the reason for SIP’s popularity after only five years, he answered that the Swartland is authentic, and described his second harvest experience as a winemaker, at Eben Sadie’s cellar:

All of that crap [before], this was real winemaking. Very happening. […] And also, no intervention, it just happened and the wines are amazing! People love it… It’s authentic. (Donovan Rall)

What does Donovan mean with real and authentic in the above quote? What is real winemaking according to him? According to Donovan, the closeness of winemaker Eben Sadie during the winemaking process was a big contrast with the previous winery he worked at, where the head winemaker wasn’t in direct contact with his cellar hands. Also, these other wineries had fancy machinery and manipulated wines by, for instance, adding acid. His experience in the Swartland was without any intervention, meaning for example no use of pesticides in the vineyards or chemical constituents in the wine. This style of winemaking seems to be very appealing for consumers in the contemporary consumer society of the Global North, and I will devote this chapter to explain why.

My initial research was based on the SIP producer’s side of the story, and I didn’t interview any consumers of SIP wines to ask them what they found authentic about SIP wine. However, by working in the wine business, I know that nowadays, authenticity is becoming more and more important for people, but why? I will use other anthropologists’ work to elaborate. Van der Port (2005; 2004; 2002), Lindholm (2002; 2008) and Pratt (2007) did research on the way authenticity is attributed to (food) products and I will mention their relevant literature to illustrate my point.

First, I will provide a diary fragment of the festival the Swartland Revolution and clarify how this wine festival functions as a bottom-up marketing tool. Further, I will describe what is meant with authenticity, and show how its rising popularity becomes visible in increased focus on the ‘local’ and artisanal produce; and how this is represented commercially. Finally, I hope to

Keep it real : the quest for the divine wine : the case of the Swartland Independent Producers