It's a still, sunny Saturday morning in September. Bees buzz in the lavender beside the stone steps leading to the stoep with its well-worn wooden table overlooking the dam.
Penny's in the farm kitchen preparing a farm-fresh chicken. Niels Verburg is in the cellar, just past the vegetable and herb plot, 'overseeing' the hand bottling of some wine he's made for 'a couple of mates'.
Pete, a Zimbabwean 'refugee' tobacco farmer, recently planted a few hectares of shiraz on the road to Hermanus. Wife Sue is ripping open the plastic covering a pallet of new wine bottles. South African Airways pilot John, who bought a 50-litre barrel of Shiraz from Niels to celebrate his 50th, is piping wine into No. 35 of 120 bottles. Liza is operating the manual corking machine.
During a break, Niels dispenses bacon butties: fresh, fluffy white rolls crammed with thick bacon rashers, no butter required. 'Just taste that; that's real bacon!' he growls. It's from Luddite's 'happy' pigs: a boar and his half-a-dozen ladies who live in a pen further along the wall of the dam, roaming free during the day, wallowing in the water, pigging out on a healthy diet of vegetable scraps from the kitchen.
'We have a 50/50 agreement with charcutier Richard Bosman: we supply the pigs and he does the curing, so we have our own bacon, Parma-style ham, pancetta, chorizo, saucisson and so on. We sell it off the farm too, but it's mainly for ourselves; we're wine farmers, not pig farmers!'
But Luddite's happy pigs procreate at an alarming rate. So the Verburgs also find themselves supplying suckling, pigs to all their Winelands restaurateur friends.
Niels gets the bottlers back to work and starts preparing 'piggy' for the spit. Suzanne and Nicholas, who have a guesthouse in Hermanus, have arrived to help. 'Suzanne is a total foodie; she's done it all, knows it all,' says Niels admiringly. He pops the cork on some Simonsig Kaapse Vonkel.
They discuss the stuffing recipe while he pours a glass of bubbly for everyone and then starts preparing a basting sauce 'from whatever's in the cupboard'. Budding cook Alice wanders in and her dad insists she approves the basting sauce.
The next hour or so is spent in the braai hokkie [hut] across the lawn. Niels and Nicholas wrestle with wire, wire cutters, and piggy in rigor mortis. The bottlers arrive, delighted with their morning's work, and some more bubbly is opened in celebration.
The conversation covers everything from how to fit the slightly long piggy onto Niels' custom-made table-top spit (slice the nose off, says Nicholas) to why locals don't eat the Overberg's iconic but ubiquitous guinea fowl ('a nightmare to cook, it takes hours or else terribly tough, says Penny).
She's made everything from guinea fowl to kaaiings [pork scratchings, one of her husband's favourite snacks] while running the restaurant at nearby farm stall Dassiesfontein when they needed an extra income to afford their own piece of heaven.
Bubbly is followed by wine. And because it’s a hot day and piggy is expected to take longer than planned, it's the easy-drinking Slowine Chenin Blanc/Sauvignon Blanc, served, with typical Verburg lack of affection, with ice. Slowine, featuring the small local padloper (parrot-beaked tortoise) on the label, is a joint venture with Green Mountain Eco Route neighbours, including Beaumont and Villiersdorp winery. It's inspired by the philosophy of the international Slow Food movement, encouraging the leisurely enjoyment of good food from homemade produce.
A series of snorting bellows has everyone raising their glasses when Penny informs the gathering: 'It's the bloody boar! I warned him this morning that if he didn't start doing his job, he was headed for the chop!'
This sets her and Suzanne to sharing tales of how one sow became so massive on her healthy free-ranging diet, she started squashing her newborn piglets with her bulk. It fell to Niels to despatch the dangerous 200 kg dowager. Everyone falls about laughing at the picture of the giant winemaker straddling the sow to deliver a mercy shot to the head. 'Not a nice job,' grimaces the gentle giant.
In true Luddite fashion, Penny and Suzanne took on the task of cutting up the carcass, trying desperately to remember details from a 'butcher's lesson they took a year previously from charcutier friend Richard.
Chocolate berry pavlova recipe by Niels Verburg paired with More Luddite Shiraz or a Riesling....
Barbecued Luddite suckling pig recipe by Niels Verburg paired with Luddite Shiraz wine....