Don't Tell Me I Can't...Make A Living Out Of Wine

After travelling the world, Mary-Lou Nash, 50, never expected to settle, and find success, in the Cape winelands

- Pascale Bakos

As I swirl and then sip on the fruity notes of a bottle of Shiraz I’ve produced, I think how many people would love the excuse to taste wine as a part of their job - and how fortunate I am to do just that.

Strangely enough, I had always been a beer drinker, and my passion for wine only started in my late twenties, when I was thrown in the deep end of a first harvest of grapes at my dad’s newly acquired farm in Agter-Paarl. Along with two farm workers and their wives, I picked more than 2 000 kilos of grapes and drove the load to the co-op in an old Fiat tractor and a three-ton truck. Picking grapes in a bikini with only a pair of secateurs, and not understanding a word of Afrikaans, I had no idea what was in store for me; if someone had told me that 20 years later I’d be managing the vineyard, I wouldn’t have believed them.