Click here to view an audio slideshow of Will Lyons' visit to the Spier
winery

THE MAIN PRIZE

Flying from Edinburgh or Glasgow, you'll enjoy seven nights' luxury accommodation at the Spier Hotel plus car hire for the duration of your stay. Nestled on the banks of the Eerste river in the heart of the Stellenbosch wine region, the hotel has panoramic views of the Helderberg mountains and the surrounding
Spier vineyards. The Spier experience offers Cape Dutch architecture, breathtaking views, fine food, luxury four-star accommodation, art culture and conservation – but the pleasureSpier has been most closely associated with for three centuries is, of course, wine. Spier is also the perfect base for exploring the Cape – the bustling cultural capital of Cape Town, stunning, deserted beaches, historic Robben Island, the awe-inspiring Table Mountain and
the spectacular Cape Point are all within reach.

RUNNERS-UP PRIZES

Ten lucky readers will receive a mixed case of Spier wine.

HOW TO ENTER

There are two ways to enter: by text or online. Entry closes at midnight, Sunday, October 26.
TEXT Simply text the word sosspier followed by a space, then your name, followed by a space, then your address and postcode to 81800 (like this example): sosspier (space)john(space)smith(space)42 hill street(space)eh33px Texts cost 60p plus your usual standard network rate.
ONLINE Log on to www.scotlandonsunday.com/prize and follow the instructions.

Terms and conditions

Closing date for entries is midnight on October 26. No purchase necessary. The winners will be selected at random from all entries received. By entering a prize draw all participants will be deemed to have accepted and agree to be bound by these terms and conditions. By supplying your mobile phone number, you are happy to receive SMS/MMS messages from Johnston Press and its approved business partners. Johnston Press (or via its agents) and its business partners may contact you about new promotions, products and services. Please add the word STOP to the end of your message if you do not wish to receive these.
For quality and training purposes, we may monitor communications. Normal Scotland on Sunday rules apply. For a full set of terms and conditions please visit: www.scotlandonsunday.com/terms

Will Lyons on his trip to the Spier Winery

IT'S raining in Slanghoek. Cutting our way through the Cape Fold mountain range on the formidable N1 highway a stray baboon scurries for cover, eager to find shelter from the torrential downpour. Frans Smit, head winemaker at Spier, growls under his breath. Baboons here are a problem, an excitable troop when hungry can destroy a vineyard within minutes causing what Frans describes as "chaos." There are many areas of outstanding natural beauty in the world's vinelands but few compete with the spectacular backdrop of the Western Cape. Here, scattered outside the leafy university town of Stellenbosch, Cape Dutch wine farms, little changed since the seventeenth century, pepper a landscape dominated by the blue-shadowed stack of Mountain sandstone.
We had started out early. The night before Frans had told us to be up before sunrise. With rain battering Stellenbosch, work in the vineyards had stopped. Today would be spent buying wine.

But this is not wine buying as you and I know it, there are no immaculately kept bottles, neatly stacked supermarkets shelves or silver tongued wine merchants enticing us into purchasing a case. This is wine country where they talk in litres - by the million. Every year Frans and his team will buy in more than 11 million litres of "juice". With that sort of responsibility it is not surprising he spends most of the vintage checking up on the myriad of producers he regularly buys from. We turn off the N1 towards Breedekloof, a valley framed by the Slanghoek mountain range. A few moments later we are standing in a small office, flanked by fermentation tanks, surrounded by row upon row of small plastic bottles filled with a cloudy, milky green liquid.
The winemaker hovers nervously in the background as we prepare to taste. I glance at the clock, it's a little before eight in the morning and lined up in front of me are thirty tank samples of still fermenting sauvignon blanc, the first of what I later discover will be more than 100 samples tasted that day, I pray my dentist will forgive me.

It's a common misconception that all wine writers hanker after owning their own vineyard. Lazy days spent tending vines, in sun soaked isolation, with nothing more to worry about than the rhythms of the season and the small matter of lunch. Back in the real world winemaking is fraught with difficulties. However rewarding it is to see your name on the label of a bottle the pay off is more often than not years of hard labour, paperwork, financial worries, unreliable weather and unreliable staff. To compound matters once the liquid is in the bottle, one has to sell the stuff, often a gruelling global trek around various price conscious markets. I grew up on a pig farm so any romantic notion of farming was pummelled out of me from an early age when I was obliged to muck out more pigsties, on more freezing cold mornings then I care to remember. Do I have a romantic calling to make wine? No, I'm more than happy to write about it.

Despite this I have often felt mildly inadequate when talking to winemakers. Like sports writers, theatre critics and restaurant reviewers, however good your palate and critical faculties are there is always that nagging feeling that one day someone might turn round and say: "Well, if that's what you think of my wine, why don't you have a go - see if you can do better." So, this March, overalls, sturdy boots and notebook in hand - that's exactly what I did. Putting my palate where my mouth is I attempted to make my very own wine.
In winemaking terms South Africa is as interesting as it gets. Stylistically its wines sit halfway between the restrained elegance of Europe and the generous, fruit driven character of the New World.

Lost time is something South Africa's winemakers are desperately trying to make up for. For many winemakers the post-apartheid world represented an opportunity to experience winemaking in France, California and Australia. Now, having returned home, there is an energy and attitude surrounding the industry. The country is already the eighth largest producer of wine in the world and its sales in the UK are growing every year.

Spier, like many South African wineries, can trace its lineage back to the late seventeenth century. Its estate comprises of more than eight individual vineyards or wine farms in and around the Western Cape. Its winery, where I worked with its eight man winemaking team, sits in the shadow of the Helderberg Mountain straddling the river Eerste.
Grape picking is back breaking work. But it is here in the vineyard, where the vine, as tall as a tree below ground, works to create the essence of every wine. The French refer to it as terroir, the complex formula of soil, climate, land and geography. Winemakers will tell you that the vineyard is more important in shaping the character of the wine than any grape varietal or fancy blend.

Fortunately climate change came to the rescue. Unseasonable rains, in the middle of the harvest, have not only baffled winemakers they have meant picking has been suspended for two weeks. We head to the cellar or in my case the sorting table. That morning 94 tonnes of mouvedre, merlot and cabernet sauvignon come in from the vineyards. It's a big, bustling operation with truck loads of grapes arriving every twenty minutes. After being weighed they are transported onto a sorting table where by hand we pick out and discard the damaged, off colour and green berries. The grapes continue their journey to the fermentation tanks.

Put at its very simplest winemaking is the process of fermentation where sugar is converted by yeasts into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Once the grapes have been crushed the juice is allowed to settle in large tanks where it will start fermenting from the natural yeasts present in the grape skins and the air. Once it has fermented, a process that takes about two to three weeks, the juice is run off into a clean container, usually an oak barrel where it is left to mature and then bottled.

The next few days pass in a hive of activity as I work with red winemaker Johan Jordan and white winemaker Eleanor Visser in the winery. It's notable the impact modern technology has on flavour. Winemakers are now able to press the grapes for longer and to have much more control over the temperature of the fermentation, allowing a number of different flavours to be extracted and decreasing the chances of a poor vintage. For example, a short, warm fermentation extracts more tannin; a long, cooler one produces a more aromatic wine. When the wine is fermenting oxygen can be added to reduce bad flavours. The overall result on the character of the wine is a more open, expressive style.

Back in the tasting room at Spier I join Smit and his team to taste the batch samples of white wines that will go into one of Spier's portfolio. The wines we blend will make up the final selection for the 2008 sauvignon blanc. It's a fascinating and complex process. Every nuance and character of the samples is brutally assessed. One smells slightly of cats pee, it's immediately dismissed and blamed on the types of yeasts the winemaker uses. The semillions we taste are quite thin; this is a direct result from the heavy rain just before harvest. The water went straight into the grapes, swelling them up and diluting the flavour. Another batch has a slightly flat feel, this I am informed is because the truck broke down and the grapes were left in the sun for too long. All are discarded in favour of samples that show a clean, tropical flavour.

We conclude that 2008 was an excellent year for sauvignon blanc. At Spier white winemaker Eleanor Visser talks about the greatest wine she has ever made. Frans agrees, the vintage will be remembered as a low sugar year with lower yields than usual and premium quality fruit. Pinotage, chardonnay and chenin blanc are all looking good but it's the sauvignon blanc that really excites.

"In terms of the reds, the Pinotage is really standing out," he says. "In terms of the whites, the Sauvignon Blanc is the best we've ever seen; with every tank showing excellent promise rather than one or two."

Later, back in Scotland, I catch a glimpse of a bottle of a Spier bottle sitting on a wine merchant's shelf and for a moment I'm reminded of the process that went into its existence. I recall something I was told many years ago, when I first entered the wine trade. "Mud and tractors. For all the intellectual musings that surround the great subject of wine, the truth is we're dealing with an agricultural product - something that has been made from the ground. Getting your hands dirty – that's what it's all about Will."

Sauvignon Blanc 2007 £9.25
Vintage Selection
Spier, Stellenbosch, South Africa
This is a lively, rich wine with plenty of strong, prominent tropical fruit flavours. An attractive grassy feel on the nose with a robust palate.

Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 £9.25
Vintage Selection
Spier, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Pillow soft tannins with a ripe, red berry nose bursting with strong cherry flavours. This is a big wine that will age well. Perfect with hardy winter stews.

Sauvignon Blanc 2006 £13.99
Private Collection
Spier, Stellenbosch, South Africa
A complex interesting wine packed with forward tropical flavours such as nettles, gooseberries. But there is also an Old World flintiness on the palate with a concentrated, long finish. A serious wine.