Waterhof Wines It was in May 1992 that we, Pim and Annemarie de Lijster, decided to buy “Waterhof farm”, a 16 ha. barren piece of farmland, incomparable by her peace and beauty.

We began the story of a “working farm”, by planting ca. 10.000 clementine and lemon trees, and after six years of much nurturing and care, we celebrated our first crop. The fruit was top quality… however a year later, we discovered some of the trees were infected with a virus known as ‘greening disease’, which could not be treated and would inevitably infect the whole orchard.

In 1998, we made the difficult decision to uproot all the trees, some of which had already grown to 5 meters in height.

With much anticipation and with the expertise of well-known viticulturist, Eben Arche, we planted 6 ha with 6 different clones of Cabernet Sauvignon, and 6 ha with 4 different clones of Shiraz, grafted on resp. rootstock 101/14 and R110 ….convinced that such a variety would enable us to produce a wine of the finest quality.

The Cabernet is planted at 1,20m and the Shiraz at 1,50m intervals in each row, whilst the row distance is 2,10m. All the vines are trained on a 1,80m high trellis and lie on a north facing slope with excellent sun exposure. The soils are Wasbank (coarse sand on brittle ferricrete or “ouklip”) and Kroonstad (coarse sand on high weathered clay) soils, derived from more than 500 million years old Cape Granite intrusions. Broken up and mixed during preparation and protected by cut-off drainage, these soils curtail excessive vigor, whilst ensuring a good buffer capacity in terms of water and nutrient supply to enable stabile growing conditions. Both these factors are prerequisites for good wine quality. Irrigation is supplied by a drip system which is also used to feed the vines with the necessary nutrients.

In 2003, with much excitement, we celebrated our first harvest with a good quality crop. A selection of the grapes was used to produce our Waterhof Shiraz Reserve 2003. Our winemaker described this wine as follows: