When winemaker Paul Jordaan is asked why he makes wine, he responds first with a full-belly laugh. “That’s a trick question,” he declares. But as he pauses to let the question marinate, his eyes start to glow with a childlike twinkle as a grin escapes from the corners of his mouth. “It gives me a platform to tell the story of a place,” he says. “And hopefully my bottle is the first one empty on the table.”

Paul Jordaan has been able to tell many stories over the years, working alongside Eben Sadie as the winemaker for Eben’s company, Sadie Family Wines. In 2016, he met his business partner, Pauline Roux, while she was working with Adi Badenhorst on the Paardeberg. They quickly discovered they shared the same winemaking vision, and in 2018, they started Paulus Wine Co. together. The duo’s first wine Bosberaad is an Afrikaans word that loosely translates to ‘a meeting or encounter in nature.’ “Wine is like the record of the meeting that took place the previous year, where everything comes together” says Paul. The aim is to produce a wine that finds and maintains that natural balance between all the controllable and uncontrollable, the visible and invisible elements involved.