January 2000
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The Start We completed the legal arrangements and the farm was ours on January 5th, 2000. The first farm transfer of the new millennium? January 5th was the second working day of the year. It was six months since we first saw it.
All that before we put a single vine in the ground! When we bought the farm the price was for the land, none of the movable equipment was included. Of course you can't farm without tractors etc and so we started the process of negotiation - and it all had a price - down to the last 11mm wing nut and piece of ropey old carpet. The seller was a Scotsman disguised as a Yarpy. Fortunately, Redvers Buller our project manager is a pretty shrewd guy and his job was to help us out with such scenarios. We first met him on only our second day in the valley. It was June 1999, we had narrowed our search down to just a few areas of the Cape and we were just weighing up how best to spend the diamond jewelry our wives were never destined to get. We were in the market for a farm and we wanted to see as many as possible while we were there. Due to limited time constraints we had decided from the outset to be completely open with everyone as to what our business was. People in Tulbagh have time to talk and we were passed from one person to the next. We were told that we should speak to George Leuchars who makes great red wine and farms big beef cattle. We chatted to him about farms that were for sale and he told us if we really wanted to know what was going on we had better call Redvers Buller as his finger was on the pulse of all that moves in Tulbagh. We phoned en route to his home and when we arrived he was in his small farm office. It was 4 o'clock. We told him what we were looking for and we couldn't get a word in until 5 o'clock when his wife Bridget brought a bottle of Pinotage and 3 glasses. She brought another bottle at 5.30 pm and another at 6.00 pm. By 7.00 pm we had drunk a bottle each and she asked us to stay for supper. This was the first time we had ever met these guys and by midnight we staggered out of the kitchen full of wine, rugby tales, sailing tales, farming stories and most of all optimism. We were hooked. The next day we could hardly think for the hangovers, and the hire car looked as if it had been driven down a muddy field in the pouring rain and onto the tarmac via a ditch and a hedge. Which it had. Copyright © 2000 Tulbagh Solutions. All rights reserved.
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Before winter came we had to plan the first 4 hectares, build dams to store
all the winter rainfall, do the soil preparation, lay out the drains and the
irrigation lines, lay power lines to the pumps, plant the wind breaks and buy
the root stock.