Down here in Cape Town, it seems that the infamous February heat is here to stay. It is this time of the year that I give up on pretending that being female means you that don’t sweat. Not the best time for a Cape Town tour. You want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? We delicate little creatures, we well-brought up ladies, we do sweat, a LOT.

Which is why leaving the house on a day when the mercury is set to rise to 42 degrees centigrade is not at the top of my list of priorities. There are only a few select reasons why I would even think of crossing the threshold on a day like this – natural disasters, an inviting swimming pool and family members in mortal peril number amongst these; as does registering to vote in the upcoming election.

I had foolishly left my registration for (possibly) the hottest day of the year. Not going was obviously not an option, so I was forced to get up from in front of my industrial strength fan and make my way down to the relevant registration station with the rest of the fools that didn’t yet have that reassuring little bar-coded sticker on the inside of their green identity documents.

I believe in giving credit where it is due and I have to applaud the Electoral Commission for making registration as easy and painless as it was. No queues, no unnecessary paperwork – just polite efficiency. (Granted, when I got outside my car had been decorated with a few COPE stickers but since these came off with relatively little effort I wasn’t too upset.) So now I am officially registered to vote in the upcoming election, which gives me the full right to criticize any halfwit decisions our government may make in the next four years.

Those of you who didn’t register, however, won’t have that luxury. You will have to sit quietly in your little corner keeping mum about corruption, mismanagement and general apathy at the hands of our future leaders. The only way that we will ever get our beautiful country to function to its full potential is to get involved, and registering to vote is the first little baby step in the right direction (even if you run the risk of getting vicarious sunburn just by heading out the door).

The time has come to stop moaning and get actively involved. Stand up and be counted – if we don’t care enough to make this country work, why should anyone else bother?

The heat is also on in other sections of my life, namely eBay. This popular site has suckered another wheeler and dealer in, and I am glad to be a part of its madness. Oh, the deals I have made. They are so delicious. I have a craving for tiny toy rabbits called Dunny’s and they are so evenly priced on the bay of E. In Cape Town, you can expect to pay upwards of R140 for a Dunny. On eBay, that price is half or less. I have spent hours just staring at the final seconds of an auction, praying that I am will be the winning bidder. How did it ever get this bad? My addiction is tantamount to frenzy. And I hope it never ends.

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!