Meet the Luddites
Beyond the signpost with ‘Luddite’ spelt out in white paint, trees lining the dirt road are stapled with silk flowers tinged the fuschia of cocktail umbrellas. Finally the promise of making pork sausages with ‘happy’ pigs had come to fruition when the message landed in my inbox: “Come and play piggy and make sausage.”
Luddite Shiraz had me at the label. As someone who refuses to own a microwave and lives in a home that could be a mid-century tribute, it wasn’t a hard sell. What closed the deal was meeting Niels and Penny Verburg of Luddite Wines and learning that their minimalintervention philosophy applies not only to wine but also to their beloved pigs. Then and there we agreed to meet again and make bangers.
The Luddite Movement began around the time of the Industrial Revolution thanks to Ned Ludd. He headed a group of textile artisans who opposed technology, believing machines were robbing them of jobs and changing life as they knew it – not altogether unfounded panic. Ned’s concerns resonate with Niels in winemaking terms.
“Will we advance so far that one day we put grapes in a slot, press a green button and wine comes out the other side?” asks Niels. It’s during a conversation about winding up car windows by hand and telling someone’s age by whether they shake up milk on taking it from the fridge – from an era when milk was delivered to the door and a clot of cream collected at the neck of the bottle. And where did bacon rinds go?
THE HARVEST
The last time I motored through Bot River to Luddite Wines, it was harvest – my first and Luddite’s 10th. It was also a blearyeyed 6am on a Sunday. The dangled carrot was ‘happy’ bacon butties and bubbly for breakfast. Family, friends, relatives, acquaintances and basically anyone who has two hands and is willing, gather annually for manual picking. The invitation read, “Pick one row of grapes and in exchange you get to eat, drink and be merry…” With a personal PS from Penny: “Bugger the deadlines. Come have fun.”
The Luddite harvest ritual begins with Niels shaving his head. “He doesn’t have time to brush the three remaining hairs,” says Penny and it’s become tradition, along with growing a beard. “It’s trimmed into all sorts of wonderful designs, mutton chops, scary moustaches, a bokkie that was plaited – Niels’ way of dealing with post-harvest stress!
In the golden light of a February morning, Niels Verburg, winemaker and ‘boss’, casts an imposing figure with Luddite Shiraz ‘tattooed’ on the back of his bald head. I certainly wasn’t going to be tossing under-ripe berries or shrivelled raisins in my basket… After the briefing, sunhats were pulled on tight and secateurs and crates issued at the cellar.
It was an education, seeing how dramatically bunches differed, even if the change in location was only by a few centimetres. Niels kept our morale as high as the noon sun by driving up at precisely the right moment, handing out icy lagers and imparting his harvest wisdom: “It takes a lot of beer to make good wine!” It was only much later, once all the grapes were in, that Niels joined us to uncork a celebratory bottle.
“The 2010 harvest yielded 18 tonnes, 50% down on the usual 36,” Niels tells me close to a year later. “There were lots of green berries because of wind during fl owering so we didn’t press too hard during crushing.” Regardless of the small yield per tonne he’s pleased with the result that will fill about 15 000 bottles for the 2014 release. He’s also satisfied that since the first harvest of 2000, his Shiraz has shown a steady improvement year on year.
For Niels the attainable definition of success is self-sufficiency. “If I never have to leave the farm… If I can trundle down to town on my donkey to get bread and cheese… and people say, ‘Look there comes the mad old drunk who lives on the hill!’” He smiles and then becomes serious. “We have our own meat, wine, olives, olive oil. And if I don’t have to get into my car to sell my wine, if my wine sells itself, then I’ve made it.”
THE WINE
I bought my first bottle, Luddite Shiraz 2003, from a wine merchant who enthused about it being like Niels Verburg in a glass; Niels is six-foot-four and when he smiles he appears to be beaming an embrace in your direction. I think of his response on being a ‘happy’ winemaker, “Sure, an uptight winemaker is going to make uptight wine.” Something Luddite Shiraz certainly isn’t.
“Most teenagers start by drinking beer,” says Niels. “My first drink was cane and Coke when playing league golf at Westlake – I was about 14 at the time and my mother couldn’t smell it on my breath,” he says with that smile. At 17 he won a bottle of Shiraz at a golf day, “It was the old Hartenberg Shiraz or Zandvliet Shiraz. I just enjoyed it the first time I drank it.”
Working a harvest in Australia confirmed his love for Shiraz, although when sipping an Aussie Shiraz now, on home soil and out of the country’s context, Niels finds it “too over-the-top and concocted”. But he still holds some Australian examples in high regard: Peter Lehmann Stonewell and Jim Barry The Armagh (just for the label) and the wineries Plantagenet and Torbreck.
Furthermore, it consolidated his views on winemaking. “It really hit home when I was working in Australia and I saw how much they used new technology to manipulate the wine,” says Niels, “Then I went to Chile and it was as if I’d gone back 20 years to these antiquated cellars and yet I’d never seen that quality of wine.”
Although it was always his plan to come back, Niels travelled overseas in 1991. In 1994, he worked the harvest in Western Australia for the BRL Hardy group, in what Niels calls “a juggernaught of a winery”, and the following year he worked at Viña Santa Rita in Chile. “It was just as big [as BRL],” says Niels, “but the total opposite; ramshackled, chaotic. But they had great fruit and passion.
“The nitty-gritty of good winemaking is to have good grapes, good yeast and good barrels. Being high-tech and cutting-edge isn’t important to me. When you go into a winery and see the centrifuges and reverse osmosis, it’s like going into the kitchen of a top restaurant and seeing a microwave, and you think, ‘Hey, that’s not right.’”
When Niels runs through possible food pairings for his Shiraz – cooler, feminine vintages with seared tuna and hotter, chunkier vintages with rare rump steak or lamb shanks – like the harvest, he’s concerned with the spirit in which it is done. “I had some South Americans here the other day and we opened an older vintage, a bottle of 2004, and cut up some saucisson and I had some day-old rolls and it worked beautifully because it was so spontaneous!”
“The big thing is to be real,” he explains. I sense he and Penny are bonded on this shared value; that and a sense of humour. “It’s about wholesome, honest living. What you see is what you get.” His words, but exactly the ones I would have chosen to describe their set-up.
When I arrive for the interview, Penny is still in her gym T-shirt – recently stained with the strawberry and honey jam bubbling on the stove. She’s just dispatched her middle daughter Alice to tie raspberry canes to stakes using a nylon stocking. In the fledgling vegetable patch a hot, dry Botrivier wind stirs up dust around the jam tomatoes, the same wind that’s perfect for drying pork belly for puffed out crackling. Before I leave, Alice offers me a strawberry, still warm from the sun.
Niels recalls the rainy Sunday during his tenure at Beaumont Winery when he took a bottle of wine up to a rocky outcrop and, looking at where his farm is now, he asked the question, if we can grow grapes on Beaumont, why can’t we grow grapes here? While naysayers circled, the first vines were planted without any established irrigation and watered by refilling a bucket. The rains came and it worked.
The Verburgs describe their methods as “farming conscientiously with minimum mechanisation”. Niels owns a cellphone, but will personally hand-write and handdeliver invitations to a vertical tasting. “It’s about knowing when you buy a bottle of Luddite what’s inside is genuine and made with integrity,” says Niels.
THE HAPPY PIGS
More than getting berries off vines without the use of a mechanical harvester, for Penny and Niels the harvest is an opportunity to celebrate life. The same goes for the Botriviera Drink Yourself Pink Spring Weekend Penny worked on last September (to be held in 2011 from 2 to 4 September) or the In-Search-of- The-Perfect-Banger day. They have a way of bringing people together, building a sense of community.
Penny’s best friend Suzanne arrives with a basket of perky leaves from her garden and Julie from the neighbouring farm brings two enormous bags of Cape gooseberries which she transforms into a gooseberry-and-elderflower crumble with vanilla whipped cream. George Jardine, who turns Penny’s suckling pigs into porchetta in his woodfired oven at Jordan restaurant, brings his electric Meat-OMatic mincer and there’s some banter about adding a handle for Niels to stay true to his Luddism.
The pork we’re using comes from Penny’s ‘happy’ pigs who, besides having a penchant for prawn shells, eat veggie scraps from the ‘pig bucket’ in the kitchen; no meat, no slop. Their waste fertilises the vines but the vineyards are off-limits for them and they always come home to the pen at 17:00 to sleep. Other than that they’re free to follow the river far into the valley.
Weary of how words can be misused, Penny refers to her pigs as ‘happy’. “I’d rather buy an ordinary non-organic egg from the supermarket because at least they are honest about what they are,” explains Penny. “I don’t use the term ‘organic’ or ‘free-range’ because I do have a penicillin jab and if it means saving my pigs I will use it. But they are healthy so I haven’t needed to.”
Throughout the afternoon boys and girls weave their way down the hill to jump in the dam and pigs make their way to the mud for a leisurely wallow. There are now about 15 pigs at any one time. Penny caught her first pig (Priscilla Queen of the Farm) in 1997 when ‘Oom Willie Dimlights’ (who farmed on the Boontjieskraal pad) made her the offer of, “As jy een kan vang dan kan jy een kry” (If you can catch one then you can have one).
It comes as no surprise that Penny was studying animal husbandry when she met Niels at Elsenberg. (She’s also cooked for a Duchess and baked kaaiings brood at Dassiesfontein – pork-scratching bread eaten with vark vet and apricot jam.)
Cold room plans are afoot, but for now Richard Bosman produces the Luddite bacon (with rind!) and parma-style ham. “I’m terrible at this stuff,” says Penny about marketing and selling, “Sometimes I give it away because I just want people to eat good meat! I did trade it for some really nice biltong the other day if that counts…”
Lunch is served closer to teatime and food is put out on the expansive wooden table for everyone to help themselves as and if they please – including a gravy made with Luddite Shiraz and red onions from the garden. In view is a large charcoal drawing hanging above the kitchen window, titled ‘The Luddites’.
Great analysis and discussion follows as to which sausage seasoning is best: sautéed apple, sage and white pepper, the supermarket-butchery Wiltshire spice mix or the Niels’ blend (Luddite Shiraz, fennel seeds and assorted digestifs from the liquor cabinet). Naturally there’s plenty of Luddite Shiraz to fuel the debate. Penny turns to me. “There’s always noise in this house,” she says, and then without affectation, “This is what I live for, it’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
LUDDITE PRODUCE
THE WINE: Luddite first released a Shiraz in 2000 and, while there may be some old vintages in circulation, you won’t find them easy to come by. The current vintage, the 2006, is available countrywide at specialist wine stores and at the farm.
Platter’s describes the ‘06 vintage as: “Always intense. Broadly fruited, warm nature.” (4½ Stars)
Go to www.luddite.co.za for a full list of stockists or contact the farm on 028 284 9308.
THE PORK: Luddite’s charcuterie is available for purchase on the farm: Bot River ham (Parma style), coppa, pancetta, chorizo, loma, salami, saucisson, bacon and suckling pigs.
VISIT LUDDITE
Luddite’s vineyards lie on the eastern slopes of the Houw Hoek Mountains, 30km from the Atlantic Ocean. To reach the farm from Cape Town, travel along the N2 in the direction of Bot River. Turn off the N2 at Bot River onto Hoof Road. Follow the road through the village until crossing over the railway line, then turn right onto the Van Der Stel Pass. After 1.5km, the sign for Luddite will be on your left-hand side. The farm is open for tastings on weekdays (10:00 to 16:00) and on weekends by appointment. Contact Niels on 083 444 3537 for appointments.
