Tech and Music? Something like 20,000 people show up each year at South By Southwest, the annual music/interactive and film festival held in Austin, Texas.

Hugh’s there Twittering, (he got a nice mention in the Guardian over the weekend as one of the world’s 50 most powerful blogs) and meeting up with some friends like Gary V, (the only other wine guy we know of who is there) Kathy Sierra and Robert Scoble.

A few months back SXSW asked us to sponsor the artwork on the schwag for the festival, here is a pic courtesy of Laughing Squid, of the cool canvas bags. you’ll notice the wee Stormhoek URL on the right. Sorry, you had to be there to get one

Life is about change… Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s necessary, and sometimes it ends up being the best thing that’s ever happened to you.

Stormhoek, the business, was bought a few weeks ago by our long time bottler, Origin Wines. And, despite all our very best efforts, we seem to be unable to come to terms with our partner Graham, at the vineyard.

When we started Stormhoek back in 2003, we sat in our office in London and thought, “Why can’t we make great 5 pound South African Sauvignon Blanc? Why not beat the New Zealanders at their own game? Better, Cheaper and Faster!”

Our Managing Director at the time, Nick, was a great expert on South Africa, and he went there to research the project. Ultimately we went ahead, brought some tech, contracted out our production, designed a label, marketed and launched Stormhoek. People loved the wine!

But, as the brand grew, we realized that something was missing. There are some very successful brands in ZA that some nothing more than a label, with everything else being outsourced, but we felt that we needed a place to call home. So, we bought an interest in a little vineyard called Siyabonga, near Wellington. After years of effort, Siyabonga had not been able to sell its wine very successfully, and with Stormhoek’s growing business, it was a perfect place to buy what we could call a home. So it was a good fit for both parties.

And now Stormhoek is moving on because it has to, because the brand is growing internationally, and because change is needed. Its new owner doesn’t want to fix what ain’t broken– but he does want to provide a better home – kind of in the same way parents comes home one day and say “Kids, I bought a bigger and better house us to live in!” So, right now, we are continuing to bottle and blend our wines at Origin and we’re looking for a new home. We’re thinking something closer to Cape Town and maybe with some tasting facilities.

Graham and the good folks at the old vineyard will have to go back to selling Siyabonga, or maybe they can create a new brand to call their own, who knows. We wish them luck and hope that all goes well for them.

As our resident cartoonist, Hugh MacLeod likes to say, we live in interesting times.

One of the questions I seem to be asked all the time is “Why use screw caps instead of cork”. Most people seem to associate cork with expensive wine and screw caps with cheap wine, this may have been true 20 or so years ago in the States, but now a days some of the best vineyards in the world are bottling their wines with screw caps. Why?

Well over the last couple of centuries the wine industry has been using more and more cork, however as cork is harvested from trees that are approximately 6 to 9 years old the supply has not managed to keep up with the demand, this has led to a much higher use of pesticides and wood preservatives to get the cork ready sooner. These treatments on the trees are what most people are pointing at to account for the large increase in corked wine.

Corked wine is basically wine that smells and tastes undesirable and the main cause is bad corks. The way this happens is that chemicals (mainly TCA) that can be found in the cork react negatively with the wine and cause the wine to smell and taste bad. If you look at the percentage of wine that is corked you will see the figures sometimes go up to 15%, can you imagine any other industry where this amount of fail rate would be accepted, I doubt it.

Screw caps on the other hand have an almost 0 fail rate (we have been using them since 2004 on our wines and have had no negative feedback), they can also be recycled easily, and have been used to age wine now for many years, even producers in Champagne have aged their wines with screw caps with no told negative impact (most wine is consumed within 24 hours of being bought off the shelf anyway)

For this reason you will find the vast majority of our wine is bottled with screw caps, but if your still keen to use a cork screw, for the meantime you will be pleased to find we still use cork on our reserve range of wines.

(If anyone is wondering about plastic corks they aren’t  great as they are not a memory material so you cant age wine with plastic well, and it can still react negatively with the wine due to the chemicals in the plastic. Also they are very un-eco-friendly)

Remember when no one ever smiled for the camera? In 2008, deadpan is still the style for Poppie (left), Krisjan van Rooyen (rear) and Basjan Manus.

When Basjan first came to work at Stormhoek 40 years ago (he’ll be 63 this year), there were two vineyard horses, Violet and Debbie.

His job was to feed and water them and get them ready for vineyard work. They were eventually replaced by Polka and Jan, and finally in 1993, a two year old Percheron filly called Poppie arrived at the vineyard.

Poppie still has about 2 weeks’ work every year, removing weeds in between the rows of very old vines, planted just a metre apart.

During her vacation, she gets fatter and ever more spirited. "We need to find some more work for her", says Basjan. "She’s a handful every morning".

Basjan and his wife Anna have raised seven children at Stormhoek. Most of them now live and work in Cape Town.

Krisjan has seen a few changes at Stormhoek since he arrived 18 years ago. "We used to work every day of the week. On Saturday and Sunday, we worked in the mornings. Now we have weekends.  There’s electricity in the houses and a school where we’ve learnt to read and write". 

Sometimes the world works in odd ways. In three short years, Stormhoek has grown from zero to about 200,000 cases in the UK market. But this alone, was not sufficient to keep our UK importer and ‘partner’ financially healthy. And just before Christmas, they went into administration.

While the issues are being sorted in the UK, back at the vineyard, we are busy thinking about harvest and the more mundane things we need to do to get wines made and in the hands  of customers around the world.

From down in South Africa, we view this as an opportunity for reinvention: Stormhoek 2.0. Stormhoek has been blessed with probably the most passionate group of supporters in the world of wine. We thank every one of you and hope that we will still have your support in the future.

For those members of the wine trade fraternity who may suffer in Orbital’s reorganization, we are sorry and we are working with them to minimize any problems. We hope that we can make it up to you in the future with mutually beneficial business.

Mario Scheuermann, he of the gifted nose and dogged determination, found his way to one of the great vineyards of South Africa, the Frostline Riesling, in the heart of the Great Karoo. He is pictured preparing his notebook, ready to taste a vertical lineup of South Africa’s rarest and most special dry white.

From the Rheingau and the Mosel, where exquisite Rieslings find their traditional ways into bottle just as a matter of course, Mario and his loyal and obedient wife Reka journeyed half way across the world to the rough bush country of the elevated plateau known as the Groot  Karoo, home to Dorper sheep and little isolated communities of people, where Germany means a shiny automobile with city plates streaking through town.

Reka had to drive, for Mario could not afford to arrive in a stressed condition. They knew that the Frostline Riesling Vineyard was at the end of a long dirt road, winding high into the southern-most snow country in Africa. But two hours after leaving the last group of buildings that constituted a town, Reka stopped the car on the edge of the earth road in the darkening twilight and asked Mario if they should turn back.   

"We are not in Germany now", he said. "Nor are we in Hungary. We are in Afrika. If we have to sleep here on the road with the African animals, because we tried and failed, will will have to. But for now, we carry on."

Just before dark, the Scheuermanns drove slowly into the driveway between rows of vines, past the baby ostriches and up to the home of Nelmarie and Guillaume, their hosts. The tasting was then scheduled for the early morning, when Mario would have properly rested.

The results of Mario’s careful evaluation are not available for publication here, as Mario has his own blog, the most popular in Germany.

You can find Mario’s views on many things, including Jack&Knox Frostline Riesling through info@degustation.de or on Germany’s no 1 wine blog http://drinktank.blogg.de. The direct access to the Frostline story is at http://drinktank.blogg.de/eintrag.php?id=2147

Sounds scary? I am pretty scared. Four weeks ago I was a pre-school teacher. I spent most of my time being a mother and a housewife. Now I am a man in charge of 7 men and half a dozen women, running the Stormhoek vineyards.

My name is Lizel Brown. I am 30 years old and keen to show that I can do this job. My husband was the vineyard manager. A few months ago he began to get sick. His lungs were weak. He just got weaker and weaker and the doctors couldn’t help.  He began to talk of dying and then he died.

I have been put in charge. I thought I knew a lot about how things are done here. 10 years of living with Melvin was good training. But now I see that what I don’t know is more than what I know.

I have a lot of support. There are a lot of experts here to guide and train me. Even the people I supervise show me what to watch out for. Because I have been living here, I know everybody well, and I have walked all over this beautiful vineyard and farm dozens of times.

I’m sure I will be able to do it. But it is still scary. There are men in my team  old enough to be my father and they have never taken orders from a woman before. I will work alongside them and I will take courses. And I will listen closely. And I will try not to get too upset if things don’t go the way I hope.

This morning the team needed one more person to go to do a special job. I said "I’ll go". One of the men said "No, we need a man." I said "I’m a man" and I went.

I would like to tell my story from time to time. My ups and downs.  If there is anyone out there who has had this kind of problem, I would love to know.    

There are 3 embryonic bunches of Cabernet Sauvignon in the picture. Two are top right and one is on the smaller stem, lower left.

The lower left stem has been removed. Its has one bunch with pin-head sized grapes, only a tenth the size of the grapes on the right.

Even this stem is too short, with too few leaves. Even if this stem were longer and leafier, these grapes would ripen 2 weeks after the other bunches.

We have been busy with a summer form of pruning for most of November (the normal annual pruning cycle happens in winter, which is July around here).  We are removing any growth that will not contribute toward the best wine that can be made from these vines.

All of the grapes we harvest from each vineyard have to have grapes with the same level of ripeness. If there’s one green bunch in the middle of 10 ripe bunches, all of the juice (and also the wine) will have a bitter, green flavour in it. So while we can spot the difference (when all of the berries are smallish), we take away the bunches that are sure to give green flavours, when we pick the grapes. 

We also cut off some of the bunches on slimmer or weaker vines, once more to enable all of the ripeness to hit the same peak, at the same time.

In addition, we strip away branches that don’t have any bunches of grapes on them. It is important that all of the nutrition coming from the ground and up the trunk of the vine goes to the well-being and flavour content of the grapes.

We do these with every vine, one by one, on the property.

There’s a weak spot in our Cabernet Franc vineyard. These vines were planted in the year 2000 and so every one is 7 years old. Fifty seven of these vines have not grown to the same height, dimension or strength as the others.

This doesn’t suit us as we need every vine to produce grapes that ripen at once, just the way female impala buck have their calves on the same day as each other.

Vines that have different growth patterns ripen their grapes at varying rates. Grapes on strong vines may be ripe today, but the weak one, next in the row, will only reach the same state in a week’s time. To make wonderful wine, you can’t pick both vines on the same day and make all of the juice into wine. One vine with grapes that have green, unripe flavours will reduce the pleasure of the total.

Before we harvest this block, the grapes from the weaker vines will be cut off and dropped on the ground, and will play no part in the winemaking.

Fortunately, the weak ones are all together in a small group. We have isolated them.

Why are they different? We don’t know. The soil preparation and vineyard care were the same for all.

The vines of course are all virtually identical cuttings. It’s possible that there is more broken shale stone in the soil under this patch than elsewhere in the vineyard.

If that is so, then the roots will grow down into lower-lying soil and these vines will strengthen and one day catch up the rest.

We’ll have to wait and see.

The hazards of farming can be severe. It’s summer here, or at least supposed to be. We’re in a winter rainfall area and it doesn’t normally rain much in summer.

One of our Wellington neighbours was worried about the requirements of his new olive grove in a very dry summer and decided to build a substantial dam to hold reserve water. The dam was just about complete, night before last, when the heavens opened. When sunrise brought light, the breach in the dam was dramatic.

The dam wall will have to be removed and rebuilt, this time a bit stronger.