We press apples grown inside twenty kilometres of the shed. Nothing arrives here on a truck from anywhere else. Nothing goes in after the press but time. No concentrate, no added water, no colourant, no flavouring. What the season gives us is what ends up in the bottle, so no two years taste the same, and we stopped apologising for that a long while back.
Ester’s father farmed Golden Delicious on the Viljoenshoop road for thirty-one years, and the packhouse graded a third of every crop out on size alone. Those were the apples we grew up eating, and nobody would pay for them. In 2015 we borrowed a rack press off a neighbour in Vyeboom, filled forty demijohns in the tractor shed and left them alone over the winter. The first batch was undrinkable. The second one was not. The shed is still the shed, with a roof over the yard and a cold room in the corner, and that is the whole building programme so far.
Viljoenshoop Road, Grabouw. Saturdays nine to three, and weekdays if you phone ahead. Tell us how many bottles and where they need to go, and we will come back with a price including the courier.
