Bruce Jack, it’s safe to say, is not like most winemakers. As a profession, cellarmasters tend to be reluctant to talk about much outside their sphere of expertise, coming alive when the conversation turns to viticulture or winemaking techniques – often the more arcane the better.
Jack, however, is pretty much the opposite. Time in his presence can cover anything from politics to African history, the correct way to serve tea and the joys of print media. Getting him to talk about wine at all is something of an effort, and even then it comes with frequent high-speed digressions into wineland folklore. These stories can be sad, funny or educational – but never boring.
Jack trained as a winemaker at Australia’s famous Roseworthy college, which produced a generation of top winemakers who transformed the wine world in the 1990s. Like many of them, he’s happy to travel the globe, and makes wine in Spain and Chile and has four different wine ranges in South Africa.
He freely admits that the cheaper, bigger-volume ranges from outside the Cape are what allow him to play, experiment and – you suspect – scratch his creative itch with, for instance, the wines from Drift Estate and his brilliantly labelled Ghost in the Machine range.
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The farm was bought by Jack’s father, who wanted to retire somewhere where he ‘couldn’t see the lights of his neighbours’ farm at night, but which was
