Your soul is already in heaven, and soon your body is to be embraced by this earth, and this is good because it is the soil you always loved, and I believe that just like we did, earth and soil love you. In life and in death, you are a true son of the soil.
You spoke often of the land and the earth. The cool red sand of the Sandveld out on the West Coast where potatoes and herenbone grow. Those salt-pans at Lambert’s Bay, where as a barefoot boy you began playing rugby, the crusty surface’s harsh, blinding white light as you ran with the ball; the sharp pain as the pan’s brittle dry cover grazed your knees in the tackle, and the sting of the salt as it soaked into your bloodied flesh.
Later, from 1968, the soils were on the hills of Kanonkop where you prepared the decomposed granite for planting Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinotage vines, digging and scraping through the surface, and manually working 50 tons of limestone into each hectare of earth.
Soil. Wet soil. The ankle-deep mud of a wet Newlands rugby pitch where you played for Province and for country; the gritty chalk pebbles of the Clos des Mouches vineyard in Burgundy glistening after a bout of spring rain, and that cool, damp clay koppie on your beloved Vriesenhof farm on Stellenboschberg.
“All the great wines of the world are dependent on the clay content of their vineyards’ soils,” you liked to say.
You were a farmer first. “Thing about Jan, is he’s crazy about soil,” said your friend Kevin Arnold to me a few years back. “After harvest, the whole of Stellenbosch is heading out to Hermanus or measuring samples in the cellar – but not Jan. He’s waist deep in some hole in a Vriesenhof vineyard checking the condition of his soils ahead of autumn.”
Having spent much time in France, particularly in your beloved Burgundy, you knew great winemakers have first to be good farmers.
“There they don’t even have a name for a winemaker,” you said, “it is a vigneron. Carer of the vineyard and the land. That’s our only true role.”
It was in France, you told me, that you truly found amazement at nature’s effect on plants. This was not in a vineyard in Burgundy or Bordeaux. But in Normandy, in Giverny where Claude Monet’s garden of light and colour and of inspiration lies. Inspiration you found there, too, upon visiting Monet’s garden during a rugby tour in the 1960s.
“I was amazed at the shrubs and flowers and trees, and the pond with its lilies, as I have always loved gardens and this one looked like it had been laid-out and nurtured by an angel,” you told me. “But what was truly fascinating, was that the flowers, the same flowers, showed different colours depending on where they were planted in the garden. And I remember thinking, that if nature can so dramatically influence the colours of these same flowers, what incredible effect must nature not have on the vineyard, the grapes and the wines we wish to make.”
Click HERE to read the full obituary.