In recent weeks, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific after looping the Moon, the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit in over half a century. The images were extraordinary. For ten days, the world looked up.
I found myself watching with genuine wonder. But it also turned my thoughts toward a very different kind of exploration, one that has been quietly changing how we farm and make wine on Rondekop.
The cellar is finally quietening down. We’ve finished our last press of Cabernet, and the quality across the board is exciting. It has been very dry, and we are waiting for the first rains to plant our cover crops. The Dexters are back in the vineyards feasting on the weeds between the rows, and once they are finished, planting can begin.
It’s in this moment, the cellar settling, the soil being readied, that I find myself thinking not about what’s above us, but what’s below.
Here is a detail I keep coming back to. In 1969, the same year Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, a biologist named Robert Whittaker proposed that fungi be classified as their own kingdom, separate from plants and animals. We mapped the Sea of Tranquillity before we properly understood the organisms making our soils work.
Within that kingdom lives one of the most important relationships in nature: mycorrhiza. The word comes from the Greek myco for fungus and rhiza for root, describing a symbiosis that has existed for over 400 million years, long before grapevines, long before any cultivated fruit at all. I first came across it in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, a book I’d recommend to anyone who has ever wondered what is really happening beneath their feet.
Underneath every vine on Rondekop, hair-thin fungal threads extend outward from the roots into the surrounding soil, reaching water and minerals the roots alone could never access. Phosphorus, zinc, and nutrients are locked in the granite and koffieklip of this mountain. In return, the vine feeds the fungi sugars produced by photosynthesis. Neither thrives as well without the other.
The exploration that has most changed how I think about this farm, the vines, and the wines we make has been the journey inward. Into the soil.
The astronauts saw the Earth from 400,000 kilometres, beautiful and fragile. From Rondekop, looking down, I see a world we barely understood a generation ago, and that we are only now learning to respect.
The other frontier was here all along.
P.S. Please take a few minutes to enjoy this month’s video on The Rondekop Garden philosophy, which was proudly made by my eldest son, Max. I am equally proud of his work in encapsulating the beauty of Rondekop and portraying a slice of the immense effort that goes into our farming practices.