When I walk into our underground cellar I am amazed at the pioneering spirit of my ancestors since my great grandfather began Weltevrede in 1912. In the early days of winemaking, before stainless steel and cooling they dug into the ground, brought river stones up from the Breede by donkey and cast cement cisterns. These cisterns would annually be rubbed with beeswax which would then be melted with a flame so each hole and crack would be filled to prevent the wine from coming into contact with the raw cement. Since then these cisterns were virtually forgotten.
When my father was farming he dug beneath the cellar and opened up some of the old tanks. He used them as a vinoteque to store some of the older vintages.
In 2005 we dug in further. With jackhammers we knocked at thick old walls for months until we eventually managed to break through and see what was on the other side. The underground tanks were square or rectangular, all different sizes. There was no way of determining beforehand where the various tanks lay as for two generations they had not been in use anymore and four layers of floor covered the original cistern openings. Thus when I began digging and asked my father, “Are there more tanks in this or that direction?” he replied that he did not know as they had been covered up long before he was born. So like Indiana Jones, we mined ever further, discovering as we made our way deeper. What an experience that was! At some points we had to dig through earth to reach another cistern and at last more than 800 square meters of underground cellar was discovered. It is ideal for barrel maturation of our Chardonnay and Shiraz wines and has a good consistent temperature of the Methode Cap Classique aging.
On request we take visitors to see the underground tunnels, taste our wines there and become a part of that timelessness. When you walk through the tunnels, you experience the feeling of generations ago, “candlelight, silence, spiderwebs,
the dampness and smell of wine aging, oak barrels and burning wicks."