LIQUID INVESTMENTS
MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Growers harvest rewards for planting off the beaten track
The established producer community would have ridiculed the idea of developing a wine-farming operation anywhere along the Cape Coast between Cape Agulhas and Plettenberg Bay two decades ago.It wasn’t difficult to see the impediments — summer rainfall, high winds, distance from main markets and lack of viticultural expertise among the local labour force — before adding the more tangible commercial constraints.It takes between 10 and 20 years for a wine start-up to get into positive cash flow, and even longer before the operation can buy its way out of debt, assuming it ever really does so. But a few brave, or foolhardy, souls were doing just that, though some, to be fair, understood they were being self-indulgent.Carel Nel of Boplaas was probably the first to give the enterprise a bash, back in the mid-1980s, when he planted his Ruiterbos vineyards 15km from the coast, south of Calitzdorp in the Karoo. I remember visiting the site at the time and instantly grasping the appeal.As the...
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