With her wild curls contained under a bucket hat, fresh-faced Kiara Scott looks every bit of her 28-years. That is to say youthful, and full of energy. She’s speaking to me from her lab at Brookdale Estate in Paarl, mystifying formulas are scribbled on the whiteboard behind her.
“Whatever you thought was normal I was doing the opposite of that,” she shares. “I was a crazy kid, jumping over fences and that kind of thing. Always questioning. I was very inquisitive, I wanted to do everything that people weren’t doing.”
Kiara grew up in Mitchells Plain, an impoverished area suffering under the socio-economic fallouts of things like gangsterism, drugs and alcohol abuse.
“I didn’t even know that winemaking was a career to be honest, I thought wine just came from the shop.” What she did know is that she didn’t want to be like the people of the neighbourhood, ‘aimlessly hanging around on street corners’. A guiding light came in the form of her grandmother. “She enjoyed drinking wine – she taught me you can have respect for it.
“Wine tickled that part of my brain that’s always curious. What is it about this drink, why do people enjoy it so much? In the beginning it was about the chemistry of it.”
Slowly the idea grew, insistently. “I was either going to be a musician, lawyer or winemaker. I’m very passion driven.” Luckily for the industry, wine won out. She was accepted into Elsenburg Agricultural College, where under the tutelage of Lorraine Geldenhuys, she learnt the ropes from the ground up, learning every facet of the business, from scrubbing tanks to capturing analysis.
“We were pushed to the limit. If you go past what you think is your limit, you reach new levels,” she wisely comments.
In her final year a representative from the Cape Winemakers Guild Protégé Programme came to see her.
She was offered a bursary from the Trust arm of the Guild and soon the round of interviews to be accepted into the Protégé Programme began.
An incubator for future leaders in the South African wine industry, the three-year internship provides aspiring winemakers and viticulturists the opportunity to work alongside and be mentored by the members of the Guild. Since its establishment in 2006, 30 winemakers and viticulturists have participated in the Protégé Programme.
“They ask you a lot of questions,” laughs Kiara. “It was often quite intimidating, you’d be sitting in front of a panel of these famous winemakers and they would ask you to taste a wine and tell them how it’s made.
“We went for psychometric tests, they were thorough. You needed to be someone they could invest in.
During the programme she worked with David Nieuwoudt of Cederberg Wines, Charles Hopkins of De Grendel Estate and Carl Van de Merwe at DeMorgenzon, complete with regular tastings and courses. “Without the programme it would have taken me much, much longer to achieve what I have.”
During this time she also worked harvests in the Rhône Valley, Sancerre as well as the Russian River Valley.
To this day Kiara says she has her mentors on speed dial. “They get to know you, it becomes a support system. I can call on Charles Hopkins, David Nieuwoudt, Duncan Savage, Bubbles, Gottfried Mocke – they always have time for me.”
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