Boela Gerber has friends over often, seemingly unfazed by cooking for numbers at 'El Boela' (with apologies to Ferran Adria). Large tables are the main items of furniture.
Boela Gerber's pride and joy is the massively heavy dining room table and eight chairs carved from Rhodesian ironwood railway sleepers. 'It's the real deal, hey. And you know where I got it? Tafelberg Furnishers!' he grins with unpretentious delight at the anomaly of finding craftsmanship in a chain store.
For the very rare non-wine-related trips, he heads for the Kalahari, usually to visit old school friend Hannes Lochner, a leading wildlife and nature photographer. Lochner's latest bound collection, Colours of the Kalahari, recording 800 days living in a tent in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park on the border with Namibia and Botswana, is another of Boela's coffee-table tomes.
The photographer's personal inscription dedicates 'page 52' (a leopard marking its territory) to his winemaking friend.
'We'd been trying to find the leopard for days, without any luck. I was on the trek home, just leaving the park when I spotted him. Even though I'd been on the road for about an hour, I simply couldn't turn back and give Hannes a heads-up! The portrait that followed of a leopard in a face-off with a Cape cobra in an acacia tree is probably even more amazing!'
Boela's love of wide-open spaces is also indulged by ‘moonlighting’ as a river guide on the Orange River. 'A good friend of mine from Stellenbosch runs an overland company and I help him out once a year taking groups down the river.'
'I've been really privileged to taste an 1896 and a 1791 Constantia sweet muscat wine. There's also a 1791 Groot Constantia that's been tracked down... but it's unlikely that we're going to open that anytime soon!'
He learnt to cook while sharing lodgings in Stellenbosch with a French couple. 'The first time I had to make supper, I didn't know what to do, so hauled out the trusty "Unbelievable Chicken", you remember that standard sweet-and-sour sauce? Well, they were very kind and said it was very nice, but also remarked that it was time I learnt what real food was all about.'
At the time, he was commuting daily to Franschhoek during a stint as a winemaker at Rickety Bridge. Before that he'd been at Stellenzicht. 'I did my internship there with the brilliant André [van Rensburg], eventually handling the 1998 vintage when he left for Vergelegen.'
Boela had followed his older siblings to the University of Stellenbosch, enrolling for a pure science degree, before a friend pointed him in the direction of viticulture and oenology. He never looked back.
'At varsity, you can do three things: study, play sport and socialise. But if you want to be good at what you do, you can only dedicate yourself to two of the three...'
Grilled sole with hollandaise sauce recipe by Boela Gerber served with lemon wedges and a green salad paired with Groot Constantia Chardonna...
Veal casserole, also known as blanquette de veau recipe by Boela Gerber paired with Groot Constantia Shiraz....