PROFILE: Joanne Gibson debunks the myths of wine

Wine writer Joanne Gibson has long been regarded as one of South Africa’s most authoritative voices on its proudest agricultural export. So it came as no surprise when she took home the top prize at this year’s Jancis Robinson Wine Writers Competition, a milestone achievement to complement her already award-winning career.

Typical of Gibson’s style, the winning piece wove together personal narratives and historical deep dives about South African wine. The 51-year-old Joburg native says she’s only getting started.

A student of English and psychology at Wits University, Gibson’s passion for history and writing predates any serious interest in wine, and it shows in her reporting.

“I’m going to get shot down by the many Jouberts and De Villierses and Du Toits,” Gibson says. “But the whole Franschhoek Huguenot myth is one thing I’d like to dig into. Their impact was not insignificant, but it has been hugely overblown.”

To dispel the Huguenot myth — one of several permeating South African wine lore — she takes to centuries-old records, and she talks about big names intimately and fantastically, as if they’re in the other room. “Ah, Simon,” she says of South African wine culture’s supposed godfather. Gibson’s research puts freed slaves, women in particular, closer to the heart of South Africa’s wine story than Simon van der Stel.

“If you look at signatures on wills and things,” Gibson says. “Typically in South Africa, you get the history of a farm and they’ll say, ‘This guy was the owner, then this guy was the owner, and then this guy was the owner’. You think there’s no connection, and then you realise, actually, it was the same woman who married three times and then maybe the farm passed to her son-in-law … The role of women in dynasty building and wealth accumulation, I think that’s never been looked at. So I’m keen to get away from the white, patriarchal narrative.”

In Groot Constantia’s original historical context, Gibson says, Van der Stel, who was mixed-race, owned only one vineyard along a belt of “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of vines” stretching from Salt River to Wynberg.

“There were the usual old stories that were trotted out and told so many times that people really believed them,” Gibson says. “And then when you go back and look at the source material, you realise all was not as it seemed.”

For Gibson, wine has the power to uncover more than meets the eye, and that’s what hooked her on wine writing.

Gibson cut her teeth as a city council reporter for the Sandton Chronicle in 1995. The newly democratic South Africa afforded Alexandra and “Africa’s richest square mile” full and equal political representation for the first time — in the same council district. Gibson recalls that “it was an interesting time”.

One day, her editor sent her to cover a wine launch for Springfield Estate, best known for its Life from Stone sauvignon blanc. All the talk about soils, cellars, grapes and rootstocks sparked something. Not long after, Gibson moved to Cape Town to study at the Cape Wine Academy.

The new era also revealed that South Africa was far behind the rest of the wine world.

“We were decades behind in terms of new technology and styles. Plus most of our vineyards were virus affected.” But the country quickly caught up. Within a decade or so, South African vintners got clean materials into the vineyards and caught up on the latest techniques. She observed these changes the same way winemakers did; she hit the road.

It was during a stint in London that Gibson joined a “dream team” of writers at Harpers Wine & Spirit helmed by Tim Atkin, MW — that’s “master of wine,” a PhD-type title in wine circles. They won awards for their wine coverage, travelling to the vineyards of Greece, Canada, California, you name it.

Meanwhile, South Africa was hitting its stride. Gibson points to the critics marvelling at South Africa’s harvests — the quality kept going “up and up and up and up”.

Gibson and her husband Patrick, 58, came home in 2004. Now they live in Hout Bay where they’re raising two children. Though she writes a regular wine history column for winemag.co.za, Gibson has mostly stepped away from mainstream wine writing, and she says her recent win has been a “confidence boost” to continue pursuing a historical novel about early South Africa as well as a comprehensive history of South African viticulture.