MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Going underground with a maker of the finest wines
Marc Kent’s Boekenhoutskloof has a concealed cellar with a collection of 94 oak foudres
Marc Kent was never quite the enfant terrible of the modern Cape wine industry, though to judge from the more-than-audible note of envy that creeps into the conversation of colleagues and competitors, his successes have provoked discomfort as well as admiration. That he is an outsider is probably also a contributing factor, as is his sometimes direct way with words.
Unlike most of his contemporaries who also began with nothing, it has been a long time since Kent was an employee: he started out at Boekenhoutskloof as an untried and untested winemaker (it was his first job, straight out of Elsenburg) but he swiftly parlayed his winemaking successes into an equity deal. Now less than three decades later he owns a meaningful chunk of every one of the enterprises that his drive, skill and creativity have put onto the map...
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