Corkscrew extract: Meeting van Blerk

3.2 Van Blerk: Felix Hart, our hero, has been dispatched on a make-or-break buying trip to South Africa, to procure a wine that will dazzle the customers of Gatesave, the UK’s most uncompromising supermarket chain. As a personal side-mission, he is also in search of further stocks of ‘Madame Joubert’, a legendary Afrikaans pick-me-up. Felix finds himself at the estate of Wikus van Blerk, a maverick and lunatic winemaker…

I followed him through into the winery, a huge old barn with a vaulted roof and a spotless concrete floor. A row of shining steel tanks, reaching nearly as high as the rafters, lined one wall, their polished skins reflecting the strip lights. Small chalk-boards, scrawled with indecipherable codes, hung from the tap at the base of each tank.

Just inside the door a modern, glass-topped table surrounded by office chairs was covered in glasses of wine, open bottles and a tottering pile of paperwork. Van Blerk waved to a chair as he strode to a wire-fronted cabinet filled with wine bottles lying on their sides. “So, you want to taste my wines,” he said, fiddling with a combination padlock.

“I guessed you might have been listening.”

He turned to me. “I was not listening. Everybody wants to taste my wines. Why should you be any different?”

Modest chap, I thought. But fair play to him, he was rumoured to make the best Shiraz in the Southern Hemisphere, possibly even rivalling the great wines of the Rhône. The problem was that there was never enough to meet demand, so his wines were never exported and customers had to beg to get hold of them. My task was to convince him to sell me some within the next five days. And to learn the source of Madame Joubert’s pick-me-up, of course.

He returned to the table with three bottles in each hand. He clunked them upright onto the table in a perfect row. I saw, to my surprise, that all his fine wines were sealed with screw-caps rather than corks.

“Corks are for c*nts,” he stated, matter-of-factly, as he twisted each of them off.

I nodded sagely.

“Some winemakers like to stick a piece of filthy, diseased tree bark into the tops of their precious wines. Call it tradition. There is always a place for tradition, of course. But personally, I prefer my wine to taste of wine, not of baboon piss.” He poured me two glasses of deep-coloured red from two different bottles. “Compare and contrast,” he challenged, and stood watching me, arms folded.

I swirled and sniffed each glass, then took a sip from each. The wines were incredible, dark and brooding with a riot of herb and spice all wrestling for attention. I’d never tasted anything like it. I thought back to my months tasting with the buyers in the sample room at Charlie’s Cellar and my more recent tutorials at the Minstrels’ Academy, and racked my brains for the closest comparison. “They remind me slightly of a warm-vintage Côte Rôtie, but they make the French look like amateurs,” I declared, hoping I had struck the right balance of academic rigour and brown-nosing.

I had. Van Blerk slammed his hand on the glass table in approval. “Yes!” he shouted.

I decided to push my luck a little further. “Very different, of course. At first, I thought one might be younger than the other. But perhaps this one is from a slightly higher altitude.” I pointed to the slightly fresher, lighter tasting wine.

“Outstanding, Mr Hart! What they must teach you in those English schools!”

Apart from Latin, wanking and smoking marijuana, not a lot as I recalled. Still, at least the latter two were useful.

Van Blerk took the seat opposite and leant in, conspiratorially. “But you are wrong. The secret is the wind, not the altitude. The winds come in from the cold Southern Ocean and are funnelled through the mountain passes guarding the Groot Karoo. Our own Mistral, Mr Hart, and the secret of my wines!” He poured me two more glasses, from two new bottles. “Again! Tell me what you can taste.”

Thus passed a scorching afternoon on the outskirts of Robertson, van Blerk opening bottle after bottle and pouring glass after glass as I waxed lyrical about his wines and he boasted of the ever-more lunatic methods he employed in his mission to create the world’s finest Shiraz.

By the evening we were on first-name terms and the wine was beginning to catch up with me. Van Blerk too, was looking the worse for wear, the lower half of his beard stained red where, leaning over the table during a dramatic explanation of irrigation, his facial hair mopped back and forth through a puddle of Shiraz.

However, nightfall did not herald the end of his educational session. On and on we went, van Blerk presenting Port-like tawny wines, fortified with local grape spirit and tasting of figs and liquorice, before proceeding to dangerous ancient brandies, as smooth as liquid satin.

He declared that the following morning we would travel deep inland to see his vines and only then would I understand the true soul of vinous Africa.

If I’d had the slightest idea what the soul of vinous Africa held in store for me, I would have sprinted back to my car that very second and driven like a maniac over the mountains and back to the safety of Cape Town.

Peter Stafford-Bow is a former top wine executive with decades of experience in the head offices of retailers and wine producers but he writes under a pseudonym. Corkscrew is his first novel and any disgraceful behaviour exhibited by the characters is almost entirely fictional. 

Corkscrew is available at Amazon and in independent bookshops with an RRP of £9.99 for a paperback and £4.99 for the e-book.