When you're blending with white varieties, how much of a texture is coming from... grape variety and how much is coming from what you do in the winery the likes of Lee's work?

The two of them go hand in hand because you will get a textural feel for the varieties for instance like with the Sem it's got a natural texture to it but then if you're putting it into oak and the length of time that you're doing on these those all play into driving it one way or the other it's also if you're looking at do you do buttonage for instance and stir up that lease to exacerbate texture or do you just leave it to get freshness out of it Because I think with texture, the other thing that we haven't spoken about comes along, I think, which I love in wine, which is tension.

You need it to be quite taut.

And that's where, as a winemaker, you're constantly tasting and playing.

Do we, for instance, stir the leaves to get out a bit more richness or... do we want that tension that it's naturally got and will we lose that if we stir too too much so you're constantly playing and it's it plays into blending as well i mean um if you think of blending um and if i use the analogy of listening to music or if you're painting the same applies If you're listening to music, it's fantastic listening to a violinist play a piece of music by herself.

But when you put that violinist into an orchestra and you have the influence of the wind instruments and the brass instruments, there's a natural richness and complexity that comes through in that music.

And the same applies to blending because we often view blending of just putting varietals together.

applies whatever the price it's about bang for your buck what are your sort of thoughts at the moment on where South African wines are well

He's a bit of a joker, isn't he?

I think Ardi is in- actually incredibly s- serious, and he's, uh...

Every move that he makes is incredibly, uh, planned and, uh, thought through, and it's very deliberate what he does.

Um, and I think, yes, a lot of the times he does have this persona of, uh, being the joker and things like that, but everything has, you know, got a very ke- keen, uh, s- strategic point behind it.

And, uh, I think for me, working with Ardi was, uh, such a breath of fresh air in the sense of first going across.

You know, when you're studying at university, you get told you have to do things in a certain way.

Where when I went across to work with Ardi, he broke that mold.

Mm.