18
Vines and Stories
“Land moves through other people’s hands, but the rooms where your mother laughed
and the trees she looked at in the mornings never really belong to anyone else.”
John Sparks
DRIVING INTO A NAME
Some wine farms you arrive at as a guest. Others you drive into like you’re entering an old photograph.
We turn off the main road into a smaller lane that threads between blocks of cabernet and chenin. At the end of it, half hidden by oaks and old pines, lies a place that has anchored part of my family’s story for most of a century.
Stellenrust.
“Welcome to my grandfather’s farm,” I say as the old manor house comes into view.
The couple fall quiet in that way people do when they realise they’re being taken somewhere personal, not just somewhere scenic. The kids in the back have been half‑asleep for the last ten minutes; they sit up, curious, as the drive curves under old trees and the house reveals itself.
It’s all Cape Dutch grace: white gables, thick walls, deep stoep. For a moment, I’m eight years old again, seeing it between my own knees on the back seat.
STELLENRUST: BONES AND BLOODLINES
The land itself is older than all our surnames.
It was first granted in 1692 to Douwe Gerbrand Steyn, a Dutch East India Company mason who helped build the Castle down in Cape Town and then came inland to see what he could make of this valley. Later, in the late 1920s, my mother’s grandfather, Richard Stuttaford—the man behind the old Stuttafords department stores—bought and consolidated several farms here.
Back then, this all formed part of a larger tract called Rustenburgh.
There was a problem. On the opposite side of Stellenbosch sat another major estate, owned by family friends, with an almost identical name: Rustenberg. Two big wine farms with almost the same name in the same district caused constant confusion—for the post office, for suppliers, for everyone.
So in 1928, my great‑grandfather did a simple, clever thing. He
renamed his farm.
He took “Stellen” from Stellenbosch and “rust” from Rustenburgh and registered the new name—Stellenrust, “finding rest in Stellenbosch”—as a formal trademark.
One administrative decision to sort out the mail, and a modern wine label was born.
When he died in 1945, the pieces split the way wills make them split. The core ownership went to his second son, Jack. My grandfather, Den, inherited something different: Stuttafords the business, and long‑term use of a home on the upper portion of the estate. He lived there for decades, neck‑deep in farm life without his name on the deed.
That upper section—Groenkloof—had its own house, its own natural pool in the river, its own rhythm. It’s where my mother grew up. And where I spent enough time as a child that, to me, the whole place—upper and lower—was simply “Grandpa’s farm”.
Ownership papers have changed hands since then. Neighbouring parts of the original Rustenburgh have been carved off, renamed, become labels of their own. But this house, these lawns, this curve of river, are stitched permanently into my idea of home.
Today, the deeds for this piece sit under another surname in the broader family. The land has continued its journey. That’s what land does.
The stories haven’t moved.
FOUR WHEELS THROUGH VINES
After coffee on the stoep, we don’t go straight into a tasting room.
Instead, we climb onto four‑wheelers waiting under the trees.
Helmets on. Quick briefing. Then we’re easing out between the vines.
Under the tyres, farm roads radiate from the house like lines from a centre of gravity. To one side, cabernet rows run in disciplined patterns up a slope. To the other, blocks of chenin and shiraz catch the light differently.
We head up behind the manor house first, toward a little shoulder I’ve visited in my mind more times than I can count.
From the top, the farm opens like a map.
The house and lawns lie below, neat as a postcard. The river makes a silver curve just beyond, feeding the old “pool” that was more river than pool—a stone‑walled stretch where we swam as children at dawn, the water glacier‑cold, the sky pink.
Beyond that, vines march up and down the slopes. Beyond them, the rest of Stellenbosch’s patchwork unfolds: other farms, other labels, other families who have woven themselves into this valley.
I cut the engine. The others follow. The sudden quiet is huge.
“This is where my mother grew up,” I say. “Where my grandfather spent his weekends. Where I came as a kid and thought these rooms were the biggest spaces in the world.”
They look from house to vines to mountains.
“And now you’re the one bringing people back,” he says.
“That,” I say, “is one of the better tricks life has played on me.”
BACKSTAGE IN THE CELLAR
We drop back down to the cellar.
Inside, the air is cool and smells of yeast, oak and stone. Big fermenters stand where once there would have been open vats and men with long sticks. Now it’s valves and pumps and careful spreadsheets. But under all the stainless steel, the old logic still hums: grapes in, time, attention, wine out.
The winemaker meets us with a thief in his hand—a long glass pipette that looks like a magician’s wand.
He walks us through the barrel hall. French oak on this row. American on that. A few Eastern European experiments. Same vineyard, same vintage, different sides of the forest.
We taste cabernet from one barrel—tight, blackcurrent, a line of tannin, a hint of ink from French oak. Then the same wine from American—broader shoulders, a whisper of vanilla where there was spice. From an Eastern European barrel it shows up leaner, more savoury.
The kids pull faces at the first sip and then try to look grown‑up about it. Their parents take their time, surprised at how much difference a tree on another continent can make to the juice of a grape grown here.
“This is not the kind of tasting we book for everyone,” I say.
“Welcome backstage.”
We talk about how long wines sit in barrel. About which components see wood and which don’t. About how the final blend is less a recipe and more a negotiation between structure and generosity.
Somewhere in all that, they start to taste the place itself, not just the labels.
LUNCH BY THE RIVER POOL
Outside, the day has warmed properly.
On the lawn below the house, near the old swimming pool, a table waits in the shade of big trees. White cloth. A few mismatched chairs. Nothing contrived. An old family table that now does double duty for guests.
The pool itself isn’t a modern rectangle. It’s a long, stone‑walled bend in the river, water diverted in at the top and out again below. As a child, it felt half‑tamed, half‑wild. We’d jump in at one end and let the current carry us, climb out at the other, run back up and do it again until lips were blue and someone older decided enough was enough.
We sit down. Plates appear with food that tastes like home to me: lamb grilled just so, vegetables that still think they’re part of a garden, a salad that lets olive oil do most of the talking. A bottle of Stellenrust from one of the blocks we’ve just driven through is opened with an odd mix of formality and ease.
As we eat, I find myself watching my guests more than the view.
They’re a few days from the end of a three‑week journey. We’ve shared whales and passes, rock art and elephants, battlefields and dunes. Now they’re sitting at a table my grandparents once used, their kids running down to the river pool the way my cousins and I did.
There’s something in that overlap that hits me harder than I let on.
“You realise you’ve become part of the story,” I say to them later, when the plates are mostly empty.
“How so?” she asks.
“You’re sitting in the background of my childhood,” I say. “And I’m sitting in some of the most important pages of your kids’ memories.
It’s a weird, nice tangle.”
She smiles in that particular, slightly teary way that says the thought has teeth.
ROOMS THAT REMEMBER
After lunch we walk slowly through the house.
The yellowwood floors under our feet creak in ways that would have terrified a younger version of me after lights‑out. The ceilings are high—three‑and‑a‑half metres, sometimes more—turning each bedroom into a small stage set.
“This is where I slept,” I say, stopping in a room that still carries a faint echo of my childhood in the way the afternoon light falls across the floorboards.
The bed is not the same one, but the wall where my mother used to sit on its edge and read to me is unchanged. I can see her hands turning pages. The curve of her back. The way her voice made the room feel smaller in a good way.
She’s been gone a long time now, taken by illness far too early. But this house refuses to forget her. Every time I walk down this passage I feel her close—less as an ache now, more as a presence in small things: the way a table is laid, the insistence on certain courtesies.
The couple wander from room to room, touching the backs of chairs, looking out of windows that hold vines and oaks and, in some views, a scrap of river.
“You grew up with this?” he asks.
“Part of the time,” I say. “Enough that it set the bar for what ‘home’ feels like.”
DUSK IN THE OLD ROOM
As the sun leans, the light in the main bedroom does what it’s done for generations: it turns the floor into a long, golden rectangle.
I stand in the doorway for a moment and just let it hit me. Dust motes turn slowly in the beam like they’ve got nowhere else to be.
It’s a simple scene. A bed. A chair. A window. For me, it’s a whole country.
This is where my mother sat, years ago, reading to a small boy who still smelled of river water and sunshine. This is where my grandfather sat on the edge of the bed, cleaning his shoes slowly in the evenings. This is where I lay staring at the ceiling, convinced the noises in the old woodwork were ghosts and not the expansion and contraction of timber.
I feel the couple behind me, not intruding, just there.
“Places like this make time stack up,” I say. “You realise you’re one of a long run of people who’ve stood in this exact spot and thought about tomorrow.”
They nod. I don’t push the moment any further with words. The house is already doing a better job than I could.
WHEN LAND MOVES ON
Later, on the stoep again, with coffee instead of wine this time, the question that always comes finally appears.
“So,” he says, “do you…still own it?”
The answer is both simple and not.
“Not me,” I say. “Not my parents either. A cousin. Some parts of the old estate have been sold off over the years. Some stayed closer to the family. Some didn’t.”
They’re quiet for a second.
“It’s sad to think of it leaving the family,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “And no. Land moves. That’s what it does. What you keep are the rooms where somebody you loved laughed. The pool you froze in as a kid. The way the mountain looks over the vines at a certain hour.”
I gesture toward the vineyard blocks catching the last light, rows glowing faintly amber.
“As long as those things stay alive somewhere in you,” I add, “the farm never entirely goes away.”
They sit with that. You can see them weighing it against their own stories—houses sold, cities left, grandparents buried, the ways roots stretch and hold even when the tree moves.
WHAT THEY REALLY TASTED
As we drive out later, the house shrinking between the oaks in the rear‑view mirror, I think about what this day has really been for them.
On paper, it’s been a very good wine experience: quad bikes through vineyards, tasting from barrels with a thief, lunch on a lawn by a river pool, stories under old beams.
Underneath, it’s been a visit to the roots of a life.
For them, this will be “that day at your grandfather’s farm”—the place where wine labels turned into soil and sunlight and where they got to see, for a few hours, the background of the person who’s been steering their September.
For me, it’s a way of walking my own past with witnesses.
A way of saying thank you to rooms and vines and a stone‑walled river pool that shaped me long before I ever knew I’d spend my life driving other people down these roads.
Land moves on. People do too.
Some afternoons stay.
And if these books are going to have any real depth to them, it will be because of days like this as much as because of whales and lions and salt pans—the days where the story isn’t only what you saw, but who you were when you first saw it, and who you’ve become since.