With all the financial trials and tribulations faced by SA wine farmers, the answer supplied by “wine historian” Diko van Zyl in that palimpsest of vineyard tales Grape (Tafelberg, 2011) being launched in Longmarket Street at lunchtime today to the question “why wine?” is sobering. “With the Cape’s wet winters, poor soils and gale-force winds, vines thrive here and, as the early farmers found, many other crops do not.”

So is wine really Hobson’s Choice for wine farmers? If legislation permitted, many farms in Constantia, Durbanville and Stellenbosch would today be upmarket property developments full of Georgian Gems and Greek Temples while if farmers could dig dams at will, many Paardeberg possies would be market gardens supplying asparagus tips and artichoke hearts to Woolies.

As one of the largest foreign vineyard owners told me recently “it’s a lifestyle thing” as well as pointing out that farmland as a commodity has been appreciating at a steady 8% per annum world-wide. A commodity they’re not making any more until global climate change converts the Siberian tundra into Terroir Central and the great frozen plains of Canada become a Garden of Eden. But can you wait that long?