Cape Town, My City.

It’s hot. I’m not talking slightly balmy, I’m talking start sweating when you wake up and don’t stop until ten o’clock tonight-hot. Jip, the dreaded February heat is upon us and there is not much we can do about it except hide inside air-conditioned buildings.

On the plus side, it’s good for the grapes. At this very moment, every single winery, cellar and distillery in the Cape Winelands is abuzz with activity. Cellar lackeys are running around, dragging great big pressure pumps, stacking French Oak vats and scrubbing sorting tables to within an inch of their lives. Winemakers and administrators, on the other hand, are nervously stomping around the cellar, barking orders and generally being aggressively nervous about the state of the grapes. If they come in too slowly it means that there is something wrong with the harvest, it they come in too fast the cellar’s infrastructure won’t be able to handle it – and God forbid they come in at exactly the right tempo, then it’s just the calm before the storm and something BIG is about to go wrong.

Such is the life of a winemaker in the South African wine industry. As we all gear up for the big showdown that is the harvest, winemakers around the country are getting ready for 16 hour workdays. My father loses an average of 10kg’s each year during harvest time (which he gleefully gains back throughout the rest of the year, of course). Whether this is due to working such long hours or because he’s nervous about the state of the grapes or simply because he has to deal with the divergent opinions of 12 obstinate wine farmers, I don’t really know – suffice it to say I’m getting ready to only see my dad again in April.

But I digress. Back to the heat and why it is good for the grapes. See, the thing is, a grape’s ‘skin’ is porous, which means it can absorb things (especially water). Thus, if it should start raining now, all those lovely bunches of sun-ripened grapes that have been hard at work photosynthesizing the whole bloody summer will absorb the water through their skins and burst – which makes it effectively useless for human consumption OR winemaking. A sad state of affairs really.

So, today’s lesson is: embrace the heat. If it weren’t this hot now, then the harvest would be a disaster and in two years’ time you would have been paying through your ears for lackluster wine. Next time you go on a Cape Town tour or book accommodation in the Winelands for a weekend away, take the time to look around you. Those vineyards don’t just happen to trellis, prune and irrigate themselves; those tidy little rows of grape-bearing plants are the result of backbreaking work at the hands of viticulturists, soil scientists, farmers and farm workers. So uncork a bottle of lovely Chenin Blanc (I recommend the Riebeek Cellars Reserve Chenin, of course) and propose a toast to all the hardworking people that are the cogs in the great South African winemaking machine. Tjorts!