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.
The name is far older than the vines. For most of its history this valley grew other things. Then, in 1975, someone looked at these cool, sea‑brushed slopes, a few kilometres from the Atlantic, and decided they could grow serious wine. That first estate is where we are heading. Today the valley’s pinot noir and chardonnay are poured in London and New York, and the families who followed have turned a quiet farming valley into one of the most admired wine addresses in the country.
Yesterday the sea came to us: whales in the bay, close enough to change the way the family sees the ocean.