Wine off eight blocks on the Breede River

Fifty-one harvests off the same eight blocks

My grandfather put the first vines in on this farm in 1974, on eight blocks between the road and the river, and nobody has planted a ninth since. Everything in the cellar comes off those blocks and off nothing bought in. The soil here is river gravel over clay, which holds water deep enough that the vines get through February without a fright and still come in with acid in them. We press in three-tonne lots because that is what the old basket press takes, and because a small lot that goes wrong is a small lot.