Nietvoorbij

For years Nietvoorbij has been tucked away behind the white coats of researchers. Now the need to subsist has driven it into the public sphere.

There is no fanfare, beyond the avenue of lush old oaks, leading visitors up the asphalt thoroughfare of the green campus of Nietvoorbij. There are no loud signposts or arrows saying, brashly or otherwise, that at the end of the road is a cellar of any repute.

The people of Nietvoorbij are not even particularly perturbed about making wine of any standing. While they try to make the best of what they have, they are here to do research first - everything else is secondary.

For this reason there is little more than a diminutive number-plate sign informing that the large, blocky, white building at the end of the road is home to the experimental cellar of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) Infruitec-Nietvoorbij.

Out of this self-ordained obscurity emerged the Nietvoorbij Pinotage 1999 with 4 stars (WINE, August 2001).

The winemakers themselves - cellarmaster Adéle Louw and Kous Theart - are an unlikely pair. She is a petite red-head yet to celebrate her 30th birthday and who chats unpretentiously amidst the ubiquitous government-issue office furniture of parastatals everywhere. Switching easily between English and Afrikaans, she talks about their work at Nietvoorbij. Meanwhile Oom Kous sits quietly in the corner, uncomfortable with the attention afforded them by the unexpected 4 star rating.

Oom Kous is, by his own admission, very much part of the furniture. He's been here since 1970 and comes clean about his lack of formal oenology training - he's learned what he knows about winemaking on the job. Adele, on the other hand, graduated with Honours in oenology from the University of Stellenbosch in 1992 before working at the university and at Clos Malverne. She joined Oom Kous at Nietvoorbij in 1997 to take charge of her first vintage in '98.

Adéle describes how she and Oom Kous work the harvest. "We split up. I make the experimental wines here and Oom Kous makes the commercial wines (in a cellar next door)." However while Oom Kous does the hands-on work of the commercial wine, as cellarmaster she's very much involved with the decision making.

During harvest she is charged with vinifying the produce from the 22 research projects falling under Nietvoorbij's jurisdiction, stretching from Upington to Stellenbosch to Elim - in fact any region dedicated to vinifying the fruit of vitis vinifera. Parcels of grapes arrive at her cellar - anything from 20kg to a few tons - and she transforms these into wine.

"It's a bit mundane, this part of the winemaking, because you can't experiment much," she explains. Bottom line is that if a researcher is comparing, say, three types of trellising on one rootstock, they need to see how this affects the wine - nothing must mask these influences so she is required to follow an exact procedure with every batch.

"I make all the wine exactly the same - I don't even allow malolactic to take place - then it's bottled and tasted by professional tasters for analysis."

Sounds romantic - but last season alone she had 1040 different samples from which to make wine.

The cellar where that 4 star Pinotage evolved still has its original open cement fermentation tanks in a smaller building alongside the larger experimental facility. There isn't much space in which to work, yet they produce about 10 000 cases of wine each year - eight reds, five whites and a Port - and they could go bigger, but they don't have enough wood.