Award winning ducks (and wines) at Vergenoegd

Diverse bird life and sophisticated wines at one of the oldest wine estates in the Cape Winelands

The first thing I notice as follow the dust road to the historic Vergenoegd Manor House is the amount of ducks in the vicinity of the large dam. Ducks are not an uncommon site in the Cape Winelands, but this is an unusual amount.

“Yes,” smiles John, the winemaker and sixth generation Faure to farm on Vergenoegd, “they are Indian Runner Ducks. Their natural source of food is snails and insects. I send them into the vineyards during growing season when the snails are at their worst”.

The ducks are quacking away all around the Cape Dutch homestead, which is a historic monument and dates from 1773. It’s a happy sound and a perfect expression of the Dutch word “Vergenoegd” which means that “satisfaction has been achieved”. The farm was named “Vergenoegd” when the first land rights were granted in 1696, long before the ducks arrived.

It’s immediately apparent that John Faure loves ducks. It became a hobby of his when he swapped his pet chickens for ducks as a young boy. He wasn’t patient enough to wait for the chickens to lay eggs and the ducks could be used to eat pests in his vegetable garden. John has not looked back ever since. Today he owns around 500 ducks, of which around 300 are Indian Runner Ducks whose ability to walk rather than waddle is better for travelling through the vineyards quickly. Indian Runner Ducks evolved in the East where farmers used to travel with their ducks to clear pests in the rice paddies. John has Indian Runner Ducks in 12 different colours, from white to black, with various shades in between.

 “We use very little poison at the moment for snails and pests,” says John, emphasising that cutting down on pesticides is important for biodiversity, “the ducks work here. It’s their job to eat.”

At the moment John is developing a breed of runner duck with a tuft on its head. It’s a hobby of his and during 2010 John won the Showman of the Year award from the SA Show Poultry Organisation.: “I show with my runners, my geese and my call ducks.”

John keeps black and mute swans at his home on Vergenoegd and there is also a large variety of wild bird life on the farm, including fish eagle and blue crane. They have developed a catalogue of bird species for birding visitors to Vergenoegd and are planning to get hides built around the dam.

Old fashioned values are treasured at Vergenoegd

There’s even a range of wines named after the ducks, suitably called the Runner Duck range. The Runner Duck range of wines include a red, a white and a rose, all easy drinking wines that sell for under R50 per bottle. Besides this new contemporary range of wine, Vergenoegd has also been making estate wine since 1972. The Vergenoegd Classic Range comprises only of complex, structured red wines aimed at the elegant and sophisticated palate. These wines are made the long way around, in the age old French tradition, without speeding up the natural process in any way. These niche wines are award-winning year on year. 

The cellar is equipped with old concrete tanks, modern rotating tanks as well as glass fibre tanks, incorporating old and new winemaking machinery. The Cape Dutch building also holds new French 300 litre oak barrels within which the Vergenoegd red wines develop their tannic structure. These wines are released at least three years after vintage; continues to improve with further maturation and holds this for a long time. The unique maritime terroir adds a good concentration to the wines.

1773, states the gable on the Vergenoegd homestead dates. Today it’s a national monument, which not only has good examples of Cape Dutch architecture, but also hosts the Pomegranate restaurant and wine tasting room. Here you’ll find some of the oldest wines available for tasting in the Cape Winelands. The yellow wood floors and ceilings are impressive, although restoration lead to some of the wooden floor panels to be replaced by quarry tiles. Yellow wood is a soft wood and so the floors don’t last quite as long as the ceilings. In John’s words: “We don’t walk on the ceilings all that often.”

At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam an early 1800’s sketch of Vergenoegd estate is exhibited. Eerily enough the representation still holds today, except, perhaps that some of the trees have grown bigger – and of course, the addition of many, many ducks. Whilst researching the artist, Jan Branders, the Dutch found some documentation stating that Branders also did some murals inside the homestead. Recently experts have uncovered some interesting paint effects from yesteryear in some of the rooms and the Vergenoegd team have kept this uncovered for everyone to see.

John Faure is a traditionalist and still practices much of his father’s philosophy today: “Change is good but change for a certain reason. Experiment and adapt but don’t change for the sake of change.”

His father used to meet the farm workers at clock-in time every morning. John still does the same: “By doing this you stay in touch with what happens on the farm; you know who’s late for work and which tractor is giving problems.”

While John Faure seems to take care of most things on the farm, it can’t be easy to juggle office hours with farm work. He’s proud of the fact that they’re still keeping the history and the family values going at Vergenoegd, with integrity and the diligence of ducks. 

By Lize de Kock