(Guest blog by Muriel of www.salma-gundi.blogspot.com)
 

‘Well, this won’t do at all.’
 
That’s what we say every time we open a bottle of wine that isn’t Dean’s.
 
‘We’ is a quite small, admittedly rather odd, selection of friends, thrown together by dint of where we live, and staying together because we really love each other. ‘We’ are an Afrikaans architect-turned-web-designer (gay, mad, and with the faintest touch of what older generations used to call ‘the tar brush’); a sharp and elegant ex-city girl of Hungarian heritage who does interior architecture (beautiful and sometimes just a touch scary – her, and probably her architecture too); me; and Dean. And sometimes ‘we’ are supplemented by other lovely valley inhabitants.
 
I met Dean several years ago when I was asked to provide food for a party I didn’t really want to go to. I arrived with my pot (of chicken a la king? chilli con carne? lentil stew?), dumped it in the kitchen, and went outside to sit on the verandah and drink a glass of wine. The next minute, to my delight, in walked a man with stature, attitude and a wide smile.
 
He saved me at that party, and he’s been saving me in various ways ever since.
.
So his wine, for me, is very personal.
 
This isn’t always a good thing. I have high expectations of those I trust. As misguided as this occasionally turns out to be, I genuinely expect passion, intelligence, sensitivity and brilliance in all my loved ones do, whether it’s changing a washer in a tap or designing a store or creating a website or writing an essay or, hey, walking the dogs.
 
When Dean started making wine, although he told us that was what he was doing, we all went, ‘Ja, okay.’ And opened another bottle of red blend.
 
And when he vanished off to… well, wherever he went around harvest time, and came home sweaty and triumphant, we said, ‘Hon, do us a favour, hop in the shower!’ and opened another bottle of trusty red blend.
 
And when he brought us samples of the wine that was in the barrels, we tasted it and raised our eyebrows and said, ‘Lekker, hey,’ and opened another bottle of tried-and-tested red blend.
 
And when he brought home the first few bottles of his Southern Constellation, and lovingly poured them out and said, ‘Okay, guys, what do you think?’, we said, ‘Listen, we’ve been drinking this red blend for… Hang on. What’s this?’
 
And – long story short – we’ve never looked back.
 
When I say ‘this isn’t always a good thing’ about wine being personal, Dean’s wine was obviously going to come in for a hammering. We weren’t going to give Dean’s wine the thumbs-up just because it was, well, Dean’s. We were going to taste and breathe and snort and criticise to our hearts’ content. Obviously.
 
Only, we couldn’t. Dean’s wine was perfect. Perfect. We who had been drinking various red blends (local and otherwise – we haven’t always lived in this little community; some of us could even be said to have been around the block a few times) for years were entirely, utterly, thoroughly, resoundingly spoilt by Dean’s wine. For ever more.
 
So now, when on those very rare occasions we do open a bottle of red blend that isn’t Dean’s – because one has to keep testing the water, doesn’t one? – we inevitably very quickly push it aside and say, ‘Well, this won’t do at all.’
 
Dean’s wine is exactly, precisely, like Dean: it’s accessible but not slutty; it’s smooth without being sleazy; it’s balanced but never boring; it’s friendly but very complex; it has hidden depths (by the third bottle, shared with friends, you’ll be rewarded by finding it); it’s genuine in all the ways you want something you love to be genuine; it’s modest, but not falsely so; you always – and I mean always – want more of it; and in the morning, you never regret a single sip.
 
I have a truly blessed life that includes things like friends who not only don’t mind that I like ABBA but actually encourage me to dance to ‘Waterloo’, an eclectic wardrobe, zippy kids, a wealth of pets, bizarre lovers who usually turn up specifically when I need them, a house big enough to be a burden, and a home in a spot so astonishingly beautiful that every time I come back to it I breathe a sigh of relief. But perhaps my biggest blessing is Dean.
 
Look, I’d still love him as much if he didn’t come with Southern Constellation. But it helps.
 

Contributed by Muriel (www.salma-gundi.blogspot.com)

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It’s been a while since I posted, and thanks for your patience in waiting for me to get going again.
 
Part of the reason I’ve been a bit slack about posting is that I’ve had a few setbacks. I’d been in negotiation to lease a premises from which I would make and sell my wine alongside a restaurant and art gallery, so I was hoping to be able to share all sorts of dishes and recipes – the main reason for starting this blog, after all, was to chat about the things I love, namely, wine, food and country life. Unfortunately, that fell through – but, as they say, when one door closes, another opens. I’ve needed some time to dust myself off and look for a new home to make my 2010 vintage. Some doors are ajar, but nothing is certain yet. I’ll keep you posted.
 
Great news is that some of my wine has crossed the sea and is on its way to Europe.

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I know that winter’s coming to our small western Cape valley when me and all my friends and acquaintances start sneezing. (Although we also sneeze in spring, but that’s another story for another season.) Cold and flu viruses love our town, which is significantly chilly and damp from when the first cold fronts coming up from the icy south begin making landfall on our west coast. We live under a mountain, which seems to catch every raincloud making its way in from the southwest, and a heavy winter cloudburst can leave our town awash for several days.
 
While we go through boxes of tissues and drag ourselves unwillingly through our day-to-day chores, regularly dosing ourselves with paracetamol and vitamin C (and the odd medicinal tot of whisky), the vines are sleeping peacefully, gathering strength to produce next summer’s crop. There’s nothing they like more, after a hard season’s production, than a deep winter sleep in cold, cold earth.
 
We winemakers are slightly sneaky about pruning – we do this while the vines are asleep. It’s a simple process, done to remove the previous year’s growth, so that the parts of the vine responsible for the following year’s harvest have space to develop healthily. The objective is, of course, to ensure the best possible quality fruit, which will in turn mean great wines.

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JustMe wrote a nice little tribute to my wine on her blog (here). She was the winner of my ‘purple teeth’ challenge. As she says, there wasn’t much competition – so, readers, if you want to walk off with some of my delicious wine in any future competitions, you need to enter them. As they say: if you’re not in it, you can’t win it!
 
JustMe commented on the lack of contact details on my bottles. I’m attending to this – most of the latest batch have my email address on them and future labels will contain more contact details. In the meantime, you can always post queries, suggestions and, of course, orders, here.

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A reader – a fan of my wine, fortunately – recently got a ‘bad’ bottle and asked me what the reason for this could be. Especially in restaurants, people are often shy about sending back a ‘bad’ bottle of wine, but bad bottles do sometimes happen: wine is the result of a natural process, and several things can go wrong to cause a bottle to taste or smell off.
 
The most common is ‘corked’ wine. This is when a cork that has been invaded by microorganisms (cork, too, is a natural product) comes into contact with the wine and contaminates it. Corked wine smells like old socks and can taste very sharp. Incidentally, smelling the cork itself doesn’t reveal if a wine is corked or not – corks often smell strange, but that doesn’t mean the wine has been contaminated. And a wine isn’t ‘corked’ just because there are bits of cork floating in it – this can happen if it’s clumsily opened or the cork itself is damaged in some way.
 
Another reason for strange-tasting wine is oxidisation. This happens when wine comes into prolonged contact with air, and the result is a thin, lifeless taste. If you sometimes open a bottle and have a glass, then leave the open bottle on the kitchen counter for a day or two, you’ll notice the change when you pour your next glass.
 
Wine that has been affected by bad storage, and particularly by being stored in too-high temperatures, is said to be ‘maderised’ – basically, baked. Red wines that have been maderised sometimes taste of almonds. A telltale sign is if the cork is slightly protruding from the bottle – this means that heat expanding the liquid within has pushed it out.
 
‘Refermented’ wine sometimes happens when a yeast, for reasons not known, suddenly wakes up in the bottle and the wine undergoes a second, unintended fermentation. Champagne is purposely refermented in the bottle – that’s what gives it its bubbles – but if a red wine is fizzy when you open it, you know something’s gone wrong.
 
Most wine producers do replace ‘bad’ bottles of wine. But then, most habitual wine drinkers know that it’s not unusual to get the occasional bad bottle, and simply write it off and open another one. (We love those!)

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When I was asked to appear in my birthday suit in the Riebeek Valley 2010 ‘Calendar Boys’ calendar, I didn’t expect it to evolve into what it has. It’s got a lot of coverage and the calendars are selling really well, which means that lots of lovely moolah is being raised for charity. And sometimes I’m even asked to sign ‘my’ picture – January. There’s always a lot of giggling and/or cat-calling that go with these requests, and I usually turn the colour of my wine. But it’s for a good cause and if it helps sell the calendar, I’m happy to do it.
 
Recently I ordered some business cards from my printers – who just happen to be the same people who printed the calendar. I needed the business cards urgently to deliver along with some wine, so I was in a hurry when I collected them and feeling a bit stressed. The printer handed me the pack of 100 business cards and asked me to check them before I paid. I glanced at them – the artwork I’d supplied was on the front and they looked fine. ‘They’re great, thanks,’ I said, but he was insistent. ‘Check them properly,’ he said. ‘You never know – mistakes sometimes happen.’
 
So I lifted the top one off the pile and turned it over – and there, neatly cropped down to the bare flesh, was the picture of me in my birthday suit that had been used in the calendar!
 
I looked at the printer in horror – I couldn’t deliver this soft-porn to a client! But then he burst out laughing, and soon all his staff were laughing too. They’d been pulling my leg, and only the first 10 or so of the business cards were doctored; all the others were normal ones (ie, without naked pictures of me on them).
 
The printer didn’t charge me for the additional doctored cards but he did warn me to use them wisely.
 
Thanks, guys!

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The Wedding Officer is a novel by Anthony Capella set in Italy in the Second World War. It’s a charming story about food and love. This extract caught my eye.
 
Captain James Gould, a 22-year-old British officer (the ‘wedding officer’ of the title) is chatting to Angelo, a Neapolitan who owns a restaurant called Zi’Teresa’s. ‘Will you take a glass of wine with me?’ Angelo asks.
 
‘I’d be delighted, Angelo.’
 
They sat either side of the empty bar, a bottle of Brunello between them. ‘The last of my pre-war stock,’ Angela said as he filled their glasses. ‘I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.’
 
Angelo held his glass up to the light. The wine was almost brown in colour, and when he swirled the liquid with a gentle tip of his hand, it clung to the sides of the glass. He put it to his nose and inhaled deeply.
 
‘They call this vintage ‘‘the women’s wine’’,’ he said. ‘When it was picked, in 1918, all the men had been killed in the Great War. So the women harvested the grapes themselves. The vines hadn’t been irrigated or pruned properly or given any insecticides to help them grow. But sometimes a vine needs adversity to flourish. It was one of the best years Brunello ever had.’
 
Incidentally, Brunello (which is made from Sangiovese grapes and translates roughly as ‘nice dark one’) is an Italian red wine produced in the Tuscany region; today, it’s one of Italy’s best and most expensive wines.

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As a child, and possibly as an adult too, my friends and I were divided into Tintin fans and Asterix fans. Although I have since lost touch with the adventures of the indomitable little Gaul, I am definitely in the Asterix camp – he always guaranteed a laugh.
 
My friends and I would argue as to who would be Asterix or Obelix on our own adventures. As young boys the screaming came naturally, fish-slapping was substituted with pillow-fighting, and lots of imaginary potion (Oros) was drunk to biff lots of imaginary Romans.
 
It may be due to my Piscean nature but the dreamy, idealistic socialist in me wants to exist on that back page: long benches of family and friends scoffing wild boar by hand, with jugs of wine sloshing around, resulting in many pink noses. I would even untie the Bard and let him sing for a few minutes.
 
Feeling a little nostalgic today…

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I’m a Neil Pendock follower, even if I don’t always agree with everything he writes. So I was chuffed this Sunday when read a note in his Sunday Times Lifestyle ‘Travel & Food’ column about my DeanDavid Syrah. He calls it ‘worth a flutter’ – high praise from Le Pendock.
 
Farm 1120 is another wine I was involved with. It’s a red blend. Neil cites the tasting notes, which invite you to enjoy the flavours and aromas of sweaty saddle, wet blanket, honey, poodles and poetry. You have to sip it to understand.

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This weekend is Olive festival , wich means thousands of people are coming to visit, so I have been labeling up a storm.

I did my labeling at the Wine Kollective where I will be promoting my vino. Its the blue building on short street, so come and say hi.

A little more concerning for me is, tomorrow night, the launch of the Riebeek Valley Calendar and if the pre-sales are anything to go by it is going to be a busy affair. Wish me luck.

With all the wine tasting it is going to be hard to keep track but I will do my best to fill you in.

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