DAYS OF Wing & Roses

Move over stuffy old tradition there's a new kid on the wine-making block, and she's causing quite a stir. Lorraine Kearney goes in search of innovation

- Lorraine Kearney

Kiara Scott Farmer pours a tasting of Serendipity and grins. ‘I never liked rosé,’ is her opening gambit. ‘But in 2020 we had this young Grenache vineyard, and it was not going to make any serious red wines, so I thought, “why not make some rosé?”’

So that’s what she did – made rosé ‘with intention’. It shows. She calls it her converter rosé. People who didn’t drink it before have taken to it. Seriously. Serendipity has freshness and aromatics, but it also has texture, and it goes really well with food, especially curries and tuna.

It’s a good parallel: Kiara, the winemaker at Brookdale Estate in Paarl, is not what you’d expect. For a start, she’s young – only 31. And then there’s her background: She grew up in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain, a socio-economically depressed area, with her grandmother, mother and younger sister. Wine was not in her home, a traditional, conservative, church-going family. But what was it all about – ever curious, she was determined to conquer it.