Where it all began

My love affair with wine started in 1978 and, if anything, it was purely accidental – if fortuitous – thanks to the hobos that spirited away six bottles of Tassenberg from the kombi belonging to our school director. A five-minute stop at home had opened a window of opportunity for these thirsty lowlifes – and we were gutted because the booze was destined for a staff party at the school that evening.

Drafted in to search for the missing cargo, we headed straight to a seedy neighbourhood, a possible scene for the plunder.

A tip-off led us to a dingy scrapyard, home to hobos. Our suspicions were confirmed by the sight of six empty bottles strewn all over the premises and occupants wobbling about in various states of inebriation.

Thanks to the overwhelming stench infused with alcohol fumes, the interrogation was short-lived. Angry and confused, we left the sozzled hobos to their shambolic life.

Until then I had been a teetotaller – not the malicious type that would condemn drinkers to hell, though. But I shared my colleagues’ anger at the disruption of our party. The fact that the stolen wine had to be replaced with cash from the school’s spartan budget drove us mad.

Naturally, the incident tempered the spirit of the party that evening, though things got into the groove as the night wore on. But it was my surprise conversion that really struck me that night. The groove had swept me up so much I would do the unthinkable. The juice in my hand had been surprisingly replaced by a glass of wine. The breezy feeling induced by wine was seductive – especially that feelgood mood that seemed to ebb away frazzled nerves from the earlier experience. Gone too was my innate shyness that punctuated all my youth as I moonwalked onto the dance floor.

And so began my vinous journey.

And when I joined Post newspaper as junior journalist in 1980, I found myself in perennially thirsty company. The enduring newsroom ground rule didn’t help too. It counselled that good story tips were invariably discovered at shebeens. There I found myself on a rollercoaster of rowdy parties. The perpetual slippery path was interspersed with sleepless nights of boozing, boozing and boozing.

Wine-drinking being a rarity in the townships, I would seldom chance upon a bottle of Autumn Harvest Crackling or its perfumey Colombar sister. A far cry from the good old Tassies, a favourite among the Nusas crowd and their hippy cohorts whom I befriended and found to literally live on bread, cheese and wine during.weekend parties at Wits University, Parktown and Crown Mines. Life seemed a whirl, propelled by zol, Tassies and music of Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, Santana, Jimmy Hendrix, Dire Straits and Grand Funk... and our local hippies, Roger Lucey and Johnny Clegg (Impi iyeza), spun their magic too. Free spirits, we were.

A five-litre of box wine would easily take care of a party of 25 people overnight. And there would be a few squeezes left to alleviate the hangover the morning after.

From late harvests, I slowly graduated to steins and – in no time – dabbled with Grand Crus, often dismissed by haters of bone-dry wines as battery acid.

While the shift happened over three years, I was fortunate to have been blooded into red wine by Wits parties, which meant my palate had, so to speak, to hit the ground running.

The notion of corrupted youth had not hit me until I started longing for wine soon after the lectures at Friday lunchtime. At that time, my rucksack would be fully armed with a 1.5-litre bottle, nestled among my textbooks. My crew would be waiting for what they were about to receive on the sparse lawns of Joburg Library. A constant wonderment among city workers tending the library lawns was whatever tickled students to intermittent crescendoing guffaws and rowdiness. every Friday afternoon..Yeah, blame it on a thousand volts of Bacchus charm!