by Deon Meyer
‘Coffee . . . No, tea, please.’
Transcript of interview: Advocate Susan Peires with Mr Francois du Toit
Wednesday, 24 December; 1604 Huguenot Chambers, 40 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town
Sound file 3
FdT: In 1976 a big thing happened in the international wine industry. Later it was called the Judgement of Paris. It was a wine tasting arranged by the British wine dealer Steven Spurrier. He got nine of the most influential French wine judges to take part in a blind tasting – of the best French Chardonnays against those of California, and the best Bordeaux red wines against his choice of the best Cabernet Sauvignon from California.
The incredible thing was that the American wines won in both categories.
There was only one journalist at the wine tasting. But he was a very influential writer – George Taber of Time magazine. And when he published his article, it brought about a revolution in the wine world.
The important thing was that it happened during Pa’s last year in France. He experienced it, and it made him believe even more strongly: if California could do it, if they could make world class wines, then it could be done in the Cape as well. Our climate and our soil are better, we have a longer wine tradition; all we needed was the will and the vision.
Pa wrote Ouma Hettie a letter, a couple of months before he came back. About all the possibilities he saw, in France. About what could be done at Klein Zegen, the dreams that he dreamed. Ouma Hettie said that he asked in the letter if Oupa Jean had softened. If there was any chance that he would let Pa be on the farm. He was prepared to turn his hand to any kind of work – a labourer, or a foreman. Or a winemaker, anything . . .
She wrote back and said he must come home and talk to Oupa Jean. She tried to lay the groundwork, she hinted at reconciliation and forgiveness.
So he came home, early in 1977. According to Ouma Hettie the discussion was behind closed doors, she would never know what was said there. Father and son talked for two hours. And when Pa walked out, he was in tears.
28
Benny Griessel was in need of a regmakertjie. Just a thimble of hair of the dog to set him right again. It wasn’t that he couldn’t concentrate. It was just that it got harder and harder to focus as the morning wore on.
He stood at the computer screen of the IT team leader of Alibi.co.za, along with Cupido, and Willem Liebenberg. Together they were reading the hundreds of threats, insults, reprimands, curses, and calls to repentance, peppered with Bible verses that the company had received over the past eighteen months. Griessel read, he listened, and time and again his thoughts drifted to the Pane e Vino restaurant across the street. It would be open already. When they’d arrived, he had seen through the window that there were wine bottles in a rack against the wall. That meant the place was licensed.
He didn’t drink wine. Waste of time.
It made him think of the late, overweight Sergeant Tony ‘Nougat’ O’Grady. Shot on duty, nearly a decade ago. They had worked together at the then Murder and Robbery squad. O’Grady owed his nickname to the fact that he was constantly chewing on a stick of nougat.
A drinker of wine and a steak-and-chips man, O’Grady often said, there’s a reason you should drink wine with your meal. Because brandy made you drunk before you were full, and beer made you full before you were drunk. But wine and food made you drunk and full together.
Griessel had never had a taste for wine; he preferred to be drunk first, full later. But he didn’t want to be drunk now. He just wanted to shut his body up, calm it down. Its protests against the alcohol withdrawal were getting stronger and stronger.
The restaurant should serve the hard stuff too.
He wasn’t going to drink tonight like he had last night, that only caused trouble. Just a Jack or two, or three, after work, every night – that was all that he needed. To function, to concentrate, and to keep the monster from his door, so that he wasn’t reminded of Nougat O’Grady, because those thoughts reminded him of other deceased colleagues. Like Vollie Fish.
And the reason Vollie Fish was dead.
He had to get a regmakertjie into his body. Then those thoughts would leave him too.
Problem was, he had nothing for his breath. This morning there hadn’t been time to buy Fisherman’s Friend. It was the only thing that worked to mask alcohol on the breath. That old story that you should drink vodka or gin if you didn’t want people to smell your breath was complete nonsense. He knew that from bitter experience. All alcohol stank. You had to camouflage it.
But where would he get a packet of Fisherman’s Friend now?
‘None of these mails are traceable?’ asked Cupido.
‘Just about all the religious ones are,’ said the IT manager. ‘But the death threats are all from anonymous mail servers. All of them. We check them when they come in.’
‘And the telephone calls?’
‘We can’t see who is calling us. That’s part of our privacy guarantee.’
‘That doesn’t help us at all,’ said Mooiwillem Liebenberg.
‘Are there any of the death threats that say they are going to strangle Richter?’ asked Cupido.
The reaction was predictable: ‘Is that how he . . . ?’
‘That is sub judice information. Are there?’
‘Not that I can recall. It’s mostly people who want to shoot him or beat him to death.’
‘Can you check?’
‘Okay.’
Griessel listened to all of it, and he thought, they are wasting their time. He and Vaughn and Mooiwillem knew, working through all the death threats was really just to cover their butts. Because it was highly unlikely, the absolute exception, that the perpetrator would be someone who made anonymous threats in advance. Threateners were all cowards. They never had the courage to really commit murder.
He looked up and saw Desiree Coetzee standing on the stairs, arms crossed. She stared in concern at the cluster of detectives and IT people conferring together.
They could use their time better talking to her, Griessel thought. Because she knew more than she had shared with them up to now, he was certain of it.
But give her rope. Let her sweat a bit. It could do no harm.
Just before 14.00 on that Thursday, 18 December, Captain John Cloete, media liaison officer of the Hawks, sat in front of his computer. He had TweetDeck open on the screen, where he was following @SAPoliceService – and all the important journalists and news media – and, since this morning, #ErnstRichter, #WhoKilledErnst, and #NoAlibi.
From eight o’clock that morning the news of Richter’s death had been attracting a lot of attention on Twitter. But then the usual protests about crime levels and the government’s inability to control it began; the speculations over who could have been responsible for his murder; and the carefully crafted jokes, most of them playing with the concept of ‘alibi’. By twelve o’clock two camps had drawn up their lines – those against Richter and everything he had stood for, and those who defended him.
Up till this point there had been little from the media. A couple of journalists who were on the scene at the Alibi.co.za offices in Stellenbosch had tweeted that the Hawks had turned up – one with a photo of Vaughn Cupido and Benny Griessel entering the front door, their heads down.
Nothing to upset Cloete.
Then his cellphone rang.
He recognised the number and his heart sank.
It was the representative of the tabloid Die Son, the country’s largest daily, with over a million readers. A man with way too many good contacts in all the right places in the SAPS. A writer whose call nearly always meant trouble.
‘Hello, Maahir,’ said Cloete, and lit up a reassuring cigarette. Smoking was not allowed in the office, but he was the one member of the DPCI for whom an exception was made as long as his door was closed and his window open, because they all knew how
impossible his job was.
‘Hoezit, John. How’s things?’
‘Can’t complain, Maahir, can’t complain.’
‘This Richter thing, John . . .’
Of course. He had known it was going to be about the Richter thing.
‘Yes?’
‘He’s been missing for over three weeks, but now I heard a little birdy say that he has only been dead a week. You know me, I listen when the birdy sings a reliable tune, John. And the trouble is, this is a very reliable birdy.’
Cloete sighed inwardly, drew on the cigarette for strength, and said: ‘Maahir, the post-mortem is only taking place today. Unless your birdy is a pathologist, which I doubt.’
‘Is that a denial, John?’
‘The Directorate of Priority Crimes Investigation cannot comment on the time of death in the Richter case before the post-mortem investigation has been completed.’
‘So you’re not denying it?’
‘I’m not going to play that game with you, Maahir. I can’t confirm or deny Ernst Richter’s estimated time of death before the pathological investigation is completed.’
‘And that is later today?’
‘The post-mortem is provisionally scheduled for later today. As you know, the report can take a day or so longer.’
‘This is my scoop, John. I want to be the first one to know.’
‘Okay.’
John Cloete walked to Major Mbali Kaleni’s office. The door was open. He could hear her talking. She was on the phone, busy arguing with someone from the Department of Health. He knocked on the doorframe, and walked in.
Her desk was painfully neat. The in-trays were stacked high, but precisely. The out-tray pile was lower. The room smelled of cauliflower.
Cloete waited until she put the phone down with a sigh.
‘I don’t want to add to your troubles, Major, but we have a leak,’ he said. ‘And it might be someone on the team.’
‘What kind of leak?’
He gave her the details.
She shook her head. ‘It’s not someone on the team. It might be the morgue, or Forensics.’
‘Just thought I’d tell you.’
Benny Griessel spotted a computer programmer sitting and chewing gum. He asked the young man if he could spare him two sticks. The programmer nodded, took out some gum and handed it over. Then he asked: ‘Do you know yet who did it?’
‘No, but we know it’s one of you. Here at IT.’
‘Genuine?’
‘Thanks for the chewing gum,’ Griessel said and walked away, thinking; that was how he used to be, in the old days. Lig en lekker. Happy-go-lucky. A bit of a joker and teaser, because he drank in a controlled way. That was the thing with him and alcohol. It brought out the best in him. Yesterday at the Ocean Basket, if he had had just one single Jack inside him, he could have handled Carla’s new ‘friend’ Vincent van Eck with ease and wit.
He went over to Vaughn Cupido and said he was going to get them takeaways at the restaurant.
‘Thanks, Benna, I’m lekker hungry now.’
And then he was out the entrance and pushing through the media scrum. He ignored their questions, jogged across the road, and went into the Pane e Vino. He asked for the menu, and looked out through the window to see if the press could see him from there. Then he shifted position, out of sight. And ordered a double Jack, while he inspected the menu.
He ordered the food, and swallowed the drink in one clean gulp.
While he waited, he took out his cellphone and looked at the screen.
Nine missed calls.
Four SMSes.
Seven of the calls were from Doc Barkhuizen. Three from Alexa.
He read the text messages.
I love you, Benny. It doesn’t matter what you do, I love you.
From Alexa.
Please, Benny, just talk to Doc, before you have another drink.
Alexa again.
Will you please call me when you have a chance. PLEASE, Benny.
Still Alexa.
And the single one from Doc Barkhuizen. Sooner or later you will have to talk to me.
He felt how the alcohol was starting to make him well again. He considered ordering another quick double. There were two risks. The first was, the more you drank, the greater the chance was that someone would smell it. The second was that one of those tabloid journalists could walk in here and ask what the policeman had just ordered. They published wild stories with headlines like Cops at Alibi all day, just eating hamburgers. What he really didn’t need was Cops drinking on the job in Alibi case.
He took the chewing gum out of his pocket, unwrapped it and shoved it in his mouth.
As he walked back to the Alibi offices with the two brown paper bags of food in his hands, two photographers emerged from the media herd, and snapped him.
29
Guillaume du Toit went looking for a job in the wine industry in the seventies, and it was as if the gods were mocking him.
Because they gave him only one opportunity – a position as
quota inspector at the Koöperatiewe Wynbouersvereniging: the narrow-minded, strict, conservative, prescriptive, rule-bound, Broederbond-controlled wine farmer’s co-operative, the KWV, which at that time was merely an extension of the apartheid government.
And then they let Guillaume du Toit stand by and watch as a new movement – a revolution that represented everything that he believed in with such passion – fundamentally and permanently changed the South African wine landscape, while he was trapped in a job that he hated, as part of the repressive establishment.
‘It must have been hell for Pa,’ Francois du Toit said to Advocate Susan Peires.
He told her he had gained this insight from Oom Dietrich Venske, winemaker on the neighbouring estate Blue Valley, who worked with Guillaume at the KWV, back in the old days. In the past two years Venske had become friend and wine mentor to Francois – and on weekends around the braai fire, the source of information on his father’s time of frustration.
Venske said there were two great frustrations in the Cape wine industry of the seventies.
The first was the KWV quota system. It had been instituted with good intentions: to stem the tide of overproduction in the country. But as with all governmental interference, there were frequently great disadvantages. The trouble was that a farm’s quota was determined by its historical production, from the year dot. In other words, it took neither the terroir nor the quality into consideration. Nor did it give credit to a farmer who developed new vineyards. The KWV simply prescribed how much you were allowed to produce, of which cultivars.
Some farms had large quotas, others were so small that the farmers had to depend on sheep or lucerne or dairy cows to survive. And there was no solution. Your quota was your quota, for ever and ever.
A quota could not be sold to another farmer either. It was irrevocably tied to the farm.
Of course, the big problem with the quota system, was that it encouraged quantity, rather than quality. Overproduction of bad wine was rife.
The second big frustration was that the State and the KWV controlled the importation of new cultivars. A winemaker could not import a new kind of grape and start experimenting with it; it had to go through the official channels. And even when they followed those channels and miracle of miracles were given approval, the grapevine cuttings were quarantined for a long time. It often took a decade before you could get a new, imported cultivar into the ground.
In contrast, the winemakers in California had such fantastic success precisely because they could quickly and easily plant and cultivate Cabernet, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. But the KWV in their omnipotence decided that Pinot Noir was too thin-skinned for South African conditions, and the process of importing Chardonnay was so onerous and drawn-out that it scuppered any progress.
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And then the wine rebels arrived. They rebelled against the senseless regulations restricting the importation of noble cultivars, against the quantity principle, the restrictions on selling wine on the farm and, of course, the inferiority of South African wines.
It all started in 1971, when Frans Malan from Simonsig created the first Wine Route, to lure tourists to the wine estates themselves and start building their own brands. In 1972 the government passed the Wine of Origin law. Malan and a group of farmers with vision saw the potential to exploit the new legislation fully: to make exclusive wines, for people who were true wine connoisseurs. Original unique terroir wine.
Even if it was a niche market, they believed if you could build the brand of your estate, if you used the new laws to truly stand out, you could grow that market. The pioneers who began to do their own thing were among others Malan, Neil Joubert of Spier, Spatz Sperling of Delheim – an immigrant from Germany – and the two Jewish Back brothers from Backsberg and Fairview. Against the wishes and pressure of the KWV.
And then the smuggling started.
‘More and more farmers began sneaking in noble cultivars,’ Francois du Toit explained enthusiastically: ‘a lot of Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir. Vine cuttings were flown to Swaziland from Europe, and then transported by road in bakkies and trucks, to the Boland. Other guys got theirs by post. They’d lost patience with officialdom, and their passion was as great as my father’s. And we are talking about big, well-known farmers – Danie de Wet of De Wetshof, Nico Myburgh of Meerlust, Jan ‘Boland’ Coetzee . . .
All of these measures brought progress, and success. Big success.
‘The biggest, best known, most daring of all the wine rebels was Tim Hamilton-Russell. He was an advertising man, the chairman of this massive advertising agency. And he was a wine fanatic. His drive to make wine was so great, he first started experimenting on a small plot of land just outside Johannesburg. But he dreamed much bigger dreams. He wanted to make wine as good as that from France and California, and he went looking for land where the climate was cooler . . .
‘That’s important . . . Our great challenge in South Africa is the heat. The hotter the temperature when the grapes ripen, the higher the sugar content. It has a big influence on the taste and the eventual alcohol content of the wine. That’s why our red wines, for example, are so much more robust than those in France, America and Australia.