'I’m very opinionated,' says Rianie Strydom in a typically straightforward style. 'Ja, she's not a team player,' offers her husband Louis with an amiable grin. 'Very, very opinionated', she repeats, with a cocked eyebrow and small smile in his direction.
Award-Winnning Winemakers
There are Rianie Strydom and her husband, award-winning winemakers both, happily cooking together - yet separately, as they're working on their own dishes - in their spacious, comfortable farmhouse kitchen.
Right now, stove talk and kitchen table conversation is dominated by how they manage to make different styles of red wine from grapes grown along the same bench along the Helderberg, one of the Cape's prime red wine-growing areas.
And about who of the two of them will be making wine from their small patch of Shiraz vineyard and a handful of hectares of classic red and white varieties tended by Louis on leased land behind their home on another prime bit of Stellenbosch viticultural real estate: the Simonsberg.
Tending the family's vines is Louis' after-hours job when not the winemaker and managing director of international golfer Ernie Els' eponymous winery on the Helderberg mountain across town.
When her husband starts waxing lyrical about his 'big wines' born on these slopes, Rianie is quick with a rebuttal.
Her's is a challenging nature: she's sceptical of sentiment and impatient with intimations of sanctimony, in herself as much as in others.
'But how can you say that?' she says. 'Look at my wines: classical, elegant.
And they’re also from the Helderberg.' She’s talking about the wines she makes for American construction and mining mogul Preston Haskell under the Haskell and Dombeya labels.
'Your wines are New World: highly extracted, opulent, aromatic. Mine are European, French, with fine tannins that are going to age well and need to be decanted to open up.
How do I manage that?' An intense, yet good-natured discussion on the effects of different winemaking methods on wine ensues.
Rianie ends it. 'We'll never make wine together; our philosophies are too different.' Firmly, she ties her apron strings behind her back: 'You see; it says Firenze? It's my favourite; I bought it about 15 years ago when we were on honeymoon in Italy.'
Technically a holiday, it included visiting as many wineries as they could!
'My shiraz versus my husband's shiraz? Feminine versus masculine; roses versus mocha and coffee; white pepper versus black pepper; Châteauneuf-du-Pape versus Barossa.'
No meat moussaka with mushroom and potato recipe by Rianie Strydom paired with Haskell Vineyards Pillars Syrah wine....
Rianie Strydom’s ‘porcupine’ roast lamb with lemon, garlic and bay leaves recipe paired with Haskell lV Bordeaux-style red blend....