This wine is named after the gardener. Gillian Myburgh, née Fairhead, was the estate’s matriarch and a gardener of some seriousness, and the wine that carries her name behaves like a garden rather than a bottle: four white varieties grown side by side on the same farm, picked by hand and left to ferment on their own.

There is a longer silence behind it. Joostenberg’s winemaking records run back to the late 1700s, but the farm stopped making wine altogether for fifty years, from 1948 to 1998. Tyrrel Myburgh — a law student who became a philosophy student who became a winemaker — started it again in 1999. The fifth generation of the family now farms all 28 hectares organically, without irrigation, in the south-western corner of Paarl.

So what you have in the glass is a garden that was left fallow for half a century, replanted, and then named for the woman who tended it before the pause.

But of course, if you have yet to sign up for your Monthly HanDrinksSolo Wine Subscription then you’ll have to hunt this wine down in your own time. But until then, here is a little more about the wine:

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The Fairhead is made from all the white grapes grown on the farm, which in 2024 means Chenin Blanc at 42%, Roussanne at 25%, Viognier at 20% and Alvarinho at 13%. The vines are dryland — unirrigated — and run from five to thirty-four years old, on decomposed granite and clay shale in the south-western corner of Paarl, close enough to the coast to catch the cooling air coming off the Atlantic.

Everything about the cellar work is deliberately unhurried. The grapes are picked by hand and the ferment is spontaneous, with no selected yeast. The wine is then raised in a mixture of vessels: just over half of it in clay amphorae, with the rest split between concrete eggs and seasoned oak barrels, none of it new. The estate is certified organic across all 28 hectares, which is farming discipline rather than a label on the back.

One small thing worth saying plainly, since the wine invites the comparison: none of this is the wild-and-funky school of natural wine. It is precise, certified and deliberate. The ferment is spontaneous because the farm is healthy enough to allow it, not because nobody was watching.