It was always pushing your luck to call your farm Journey’s End without consulting St. Christopher and the Gods of Civil Engineering who have turned SA into a giant traffic jam for the benefit of FIFA over the past few years. And so it came to pass that the cream and clots of the SA wine writing churn were invited to Journey’s End to launch a new 250 ton cellar which will replace the winery with the largest carbon footprint on earth: pick grapes in Gordon’s Bay; truck to the University of Stellenbosch for fermentation; truck to Lourensford for maturation and back to the Ivory Tower for each racking; followed by a final trip to the warehouse… on the very day the roads department dug up their purlieu between Sir Lowry’s Pass Village and the farm, waving more red flags than a Chinese New Year. Now we know why WOSA prefer helicopters for ferrying guests.

All this terroir by truck, the terrestrial equivalent of shipping Madeira over the equator in the belly of a boat, certainly works as these wines had more show medals than Idi Amin. Starting with the first one – a 2002 Chardonnay that was a Platter five star sighted stunner in its day. As is the way with vinous hole-in-ones, victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat by the fickle finger of fate (a digit of vineyard manager Paul Fourie) that spent the day separating noble rot berries from gray rotters. And they’ve got better since then expressing “elegance with firm acidity and good definition of fruit” as sales and marketing director Rollo Gabb pointed out. And he should know, having run a trio of London restaurants plus the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester for seven years, being the person responsible for that city’s first outdoor festival in 1994 which attracted 20 000 Mancs.

Rollo Gabb

Perhaps even including neighbour Paul Boutinot who is rocking the daisies himself next door on Waterkloof. Manchester’s dark, satanic textile mills are now all relocated to China leaving the locals with more time to grow wine above Gordon’s Bay. The Chinese square this virtuous circle by drinking Journey’s End in Hong Kong and the mainland, inadvertently providing the biggest laugh of the day when Rollo’s mum asked “which wines are exported to China” which Rollo misheard as “which of the wines is shite?” An easy mistake to make.

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