That’s the personal quest of Joe Watson. He’s in the entertainment business. He helps New Yorkers and other visitors to Long Island have a real good time with food and the whole entertainment process. He’s on a continuous quest and you can join him. He’s looking for the best.

Joe at work at Stormhoek. This picture was taken somewhere between wine no. 7 and 8.

Right now, 1 April, Joe is hard at work making a visit to his wine bar,VINe in Greenport, an event to remember for all of the clever people who find their way to this North Fork haven between now and January 1, next year.

Every year, Joe closes the door on New Year’s Day for a three month break and sets off to look for Nirvana in wine.

This year, when the mess from the New Year celebration was finally swept out and in the bin, he locked the VINe door and set off to find the new, great wines of the world. 

First, he visited Napa and Sonoma to see how his favourite Californian cellars stack up today. He can tell you best how he feels about that.

Then he went to Europe, because that’s where we are expected to go. And finally, he went to the southern hemisphere and visited Chile and Argentina, and Australia and New Zealand, and last of all, South Africa.

Everywhere, he sought the idealistic specialist who had found the special place, the piece of ground where this or that variety made a unique combination.

In Joe’s last two days on this trip he visited Wellington and Malmesbury  in South Africa. On the second last day before departure, he made his way up into the hidden Doolhof Valley in the mountains above Wellington to visit Stormhoek.

He talked us through his three months of exploration. And about going back to work in Greenport.

Two days later, the doors are open at VINe. And there’s a new wine list. 

There are more wineries in the Pacific north west of North America than there are in South Africa. And every one of them was established within the last 50 years.

I spent last night reading about a selection of them in a beautifully crafted book, written by Christina Melandes and given to me by 23 MBA students from the University of Washington,Wa, USA.

This team of academic wizards is on a 3 week tour, studying South African businesses. They wound up here in the wilds of Stormhoek and spent the first hour making acquaintance with wind-blown vineyards and wild flowers. During the vineyard walk, our path took us past half a dozen vines belonging to Own a Vine, Save a Job investors. So now they know that commodity-based South African wine producers, the vast majority, are not in good economic shape.

Any financial crisis brings hardship to those South Africans who can least afford it, the people who work with their hands, in the cellars and vineyards, the truck and tractor drivers and the families of all. I hope that this Seattle-based team will spread the message of economic assistance and the hope of a marketing-led recovery for one of the world’s oldest wine cultures.

This group of whiz kids contains a real estate baron, a nurse, a soldier, a couple of strategic planners and managers, at least one banker and a squad of marketers. As a group, I guess they could fix anything. They are all graduates studying at the Foster School of Business at the U. of W. Of course, some have grown up in Washington, but others originate from Korea, Taiwan, as well as Hawaii and others part of the USA. The tour leader is Kate Hanck, fourth from the left in the middle row. She spent a few months at the Uni. of Cape Town last year. Keeping their minds on business is the Global Study Tours Program Faculty Director, Professor Vandra Huber, seated far right. What a pity I didn’t take one more step backwards and get her entire person into the picture. Sorry, Vandra.  

Its just as well that Althea Kleynhans likes red wine. She now has her own Pinotage vine, an anniversary present.

Althea and Henk Kleynhans were married three years ago today (Easter Monday fell on this date this year). They decided to spend it at Stormhoek where Henk had bought two vines for them as part of the Own a Vine, Save a Job project. They took pictures of their two vines. They swam in the dam. And they tasted some 2004 Stormhoek Guava Block Pinotage.

Henk is a ground-breaking entrepreneur in Cape Town’s IT world. With Skyrove, he brings wireless internet into inaccessible and unlikely places in South Africa. Althea repairs damaged lives at a Cape Town hospital.

Thousands of South African people face job and income loss as a result of the collapse of Orbital Wines, the UK distributor of Stormhoek wines. The Own a Vine, Save a Job initiative is designed to raise the R6m taken out of South African production by this default.

Thanks to Althea and Henk’s investment (see Own a Vine, Save a Job top right on home page) R4000 will go to the alleviation of suffering by people who have no other resource.

You can see who drinks the red wine in this family

Wine grapes are very small. Most people are surprised that a wine grape is no bigger than a plump raisin. You need a lot of these tiny grapes to get even a bucket of juice.

There’s a Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard here that won’t be ripe for another week or so. It’s north-facing, but low down in a deep valley and very shaded. In this cleft in the mountainside, the sun rises very late and sets early.

We monitor the developing ripeness by measuring the daily increase in the sugar content of the juice in the grapes.

We pick individual grape berries from dozens of widely separated vines across the block. This gives us a wide cross section of the condition of the whole block. If the vineyard is on a big slope, with a major differential between the altitude of the highest and lowest rows of vines, we do this over and over again, going up the hill. The grapes are squashed to release and mix the juice.

The content of the juice is measured on a the lens of a refractometer. Looking through the lens, covered with juice, you can see the density on a scale. Though everything but the water can be seen through the lens, the solids are mostly sugar, and we get a guide to the content. As you can see, the juice of Cabernet Sauvignon is clear. The colour of the wine has to be extracted from the skins, so we ferment with the broken skins mixed together with the juice. The specific flavour of the variety and the tannin in the skins are both closely bound up with the colour.

When our grapes are fully ripe the fructose content is about 25%.

But the amount of sugar is only a rough guide. Only taste can tell you that the fruit is perfectly ripe. When we get near to the expected date we chew a lot of grapes. When they taste best, its time to get the baskets out.

Yesterday, Gret had seven, fat, expanding puppies. Today, just three.

Indigo, my 3 year old granddaughter and I went to look at the puppies after lunch yesterday. For no obvious reason, Indigo cried out in pain. While I was searching for the cause a few bees begin to fly closely around us. I took Indigo out of the shed and explained to the rest of the family about a possible bee sting on her arm.

Suddenly Gret raced past us, away from the shed where her puppies lay and vanished into our house. Then she raced back the other way, into the shed. Seconds later, she flew past us into the house again.

I realised that the bees had attacked her and her family.

Over the next 20 minutes, I got all of the puppies out of the bee environment and into the house, where it is pretty dark. Bees don’t seem to like dark.

Every time I picked up a puppy, a swarm of bees attacked me. I was running, swiping at my face with a puppy in each hand. I never made it to the door of the shed with 2 puppies. It’s hard to concentrate on holding the wriggling little things when bees are stinging your hands and face. Once I came out of the door, sprinting, with no puppies. They had wriggled out of my hands and were on the floor behind me.

The bee sting toxin makes your heart race. You lose breath and can’t run (or even walk) any more. It took about five minutes to slow down the heaving chest to get enough breath, and go back for another one.

Within a half an hour, Gret and her pups had cortisone injections.

Then we had to wait to see what would happen. The crying of the pups began to wane in intensity. One by one, the weaker ones died.

On reflection, the survivors were lucky that all of the pups have had their eyes scrunched closed since birth. The soldier bees aim for your eyes. My eyebrows and the right side of my face (its’s the right side from my point of view, looking out) is swollen. My right eye wept congealing liquid all afternoon and night.

Unfortunately for the puppies, they became the bees’ main target. Their tightly closed eyelids were covered in bee stings.

I just got in the way of the assault on the pups.

A slumbering vineyard

A good deal of the grapes have been harvested for the 2008 vintages. Some grapes will still be out there for quite some time still until the first autumn rains fall – usually for sweeter (botrytis infected) wines.

While driving through the harvested vineyards the other day there was a palpable relief. The vines work real hard to produce fantastic grapes throughout spring and summer and by harvest time are visibly drained. So it is with a sigh of relief that their grapes are removed. The leaves, if not already started, begin to turn brown and in a couple of weeks – as the temperature drops – the vines will lose much of their leaves.

Late autumn, pruning takes place. Only one or two growth spurs are left on each branch for next year and this is where the new growth will take place. But for winter the vines will rest. A well deserved break in my opinion.

Part of me longs for next spring, but I know that all good things must wait and we need the time to make you the best wines we can.