Flagstone Winery

This family farm is situated on the slopes of the Akkadisberg near Napier in the spectacular Overberg valley - about 2 hours drive east from Cape Town.

The main commercial plantings will be Shiraz, Malbec, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Viognier. We will be making three wines from the grapes grown on our farm: a Pinot Noir, a Red Blend of mostly Shiraz and Malbec and a white blend of Chardonnay and Viognier.

By end 2004 we also had the following 1 hectare experimental vineyards planted: Barbera, Mourvedre, Merlot, Nebbiolo, Petit Verdot, Tempranillo, Pontac, Roobernet, Souzao, Tannat, Tinta Roriz, Touriga Francesa, Pinotage.

Up until 2002 we made and matured our red wine in the V&A Waterfront, Cape Town.

Our white wines were made on Simon Barlow's farm Nooitgedagt. Simon is a wine industry visionary and owner of Rustenberg Wine Estate and the Brampton Brand.

The two wineries, called F1 and F2 were about 65km apart, connected by one of our national roads, the N2. For four years we had to truck our one press backwards and forwards between the two wineries during crush. This sums up the logistical acrobatics we performed while establishing Flagstone.

From 2003 our red and white wine production has been brought together in a magnificent 1901 Sir Herbet Baker Building on the False Bay coastline, close to The Strand. We call it F3 - our third winery.

Theories abounded about the motivation for our Waterfront winery. The reality was far more exciting than the suppositions. We were experimenting with a radically different concept in red wine fermentation. We wanted to make wine using gravity in 100% of all grape and juice movements, but we also wanted to "cold soak" the destemmed grapes prior to fermentation.

The two philosophies were mutually exclusive prior to 1999, as it was accepted that you could not "cold soak" without pumping your grape must through a mash chiller, thereby doing away with gravity.

The only way we could do both "cold soak" and gravity flow winemaking, we decided, was by cooling the bunches of grapes before destemming. And the most efficient cooling facilities in the country were situated in Cape Town harbour.

It is now rare to see a new winery being built without a cold room for chilling grapes.

We always intended moving into a purpose built winery once we had established that our ideas about gravity and "cold soak" were correct. After searching we came across two beautifully proportioned buildings with alluring character in The Strand. 400m from the white sand beaches of False Bay, these buildings were originally part of Cecil John Rhodes's audacious mining vision. One building was originally a dynamite factory and the other a coal-fired power station. They were both completed the year he died, at the conclusion of the Anglo-Boer War.

Now lovingly restored and converted into a winery we are now positioned at the centre of our grape supply web, with breathtaking views of the Helderberg mountains. Our tasting and cellar door sales facilities opened in June 2004.

The Essence of Flagstone. What we do is carry into sunlight the spirit of a place by growing grapes there. We ask the vine roots to find it for us in the cold, dark remembrance of soil and clay. We coax the leaves into pulling up the silently vibrating energy from there. This energy is not only the result of organisms living in the soil, but also all the millions of chemical reactions that occur every day around the roots. But there is more. There is the energy of memory. Mapped in the strata of our ancient soil is the memory of millions of years of life. This energy, this spirit of place, is transported into the grapes by the vine. We harvest these handfuls of time, these bunches of grapes with complete respect.

Each berry is a spiritual snapshot of swirling climate, a sweet memory of the sun, a spinning impression of earth, a quenching recall of moisture, a reminiscence of breathing, a reminder of cycles. This imprint is concentrated and powerful when the grapes are resonant and delicious with ripeness.

We scramble around in this way clutching at the secrets, successes and failures of our interaction with nature. Through the miracles of natural, soft and sympathetic fermentation we channel nature's spontaneous narrative into wine.

And so we can taste our enveloping corner of the universe - the coincidence of geography and time.

We can drink in the wonder of it and share out the majesty of it all. We want to learn to accept the sadness of it and revel in the mystery of it. And perhaps through making wine this way we can begin to understand something of our relationship to the confusing, tumultuous craziness of it all.

This is what we do and why we do it.