There was dirt once, an entire earth
That clung to our bare feet when it rained,
Scorched them when it hadn’t,
Coated our arms when it rose
With the dry, furious wind.
How obvious, I thought then,
That it wanted to touch, interact,
Even if just molecule to molecule.
We hated that we couldn’t escape its reach –
Even indoors, weighing down our heels,
Licking our shoelaces. How it even opened itself
To other creatures, a baby snake poking through,
Surveying the kitchen. Such naked desire,
Though we never called it that, even after we moved
To another country with its concrete
And vast fields held inert beneath.
“Our feet never touch mud now,”
I told my mother the other day.
“Yes,” she said, “yes.”
That was all.
José Antonio Rodríguez
FROM THE WINERY
On 1 October 2021 Kleinood launched these new vintages:
Tamboerskloof Katharien Rosé 2021
A full bodied, dry style rosé with a delicate pale-pink colour. The nose is perfumed and aromatic with notes of mixed berries, watermelon and grapefruit. The acidity is fresh and bright, and the textured palate displays seductive flavours of red cherries and raspberries.
A dry, fresh, and rich wine with a pale straw colour. The nose shows enticing notes of citrus, honeysuckle, orange blossom and rose, while the palate offers additional rich characteristics of spice and nutmeg. The weight and texture create a lingering finish.
A bright clear medium ruby coloured wine. The nose, starts with a gentle intensity of violet flowers and cinnamon spice evolving into freshly crushed black pepper and red cherry. The initial youthfulness of the wine evolves to showing a note of chocolate with a refreshing palate with fine grained tannins adding weight to the mid-pallet. A juicy, yet elegant and well balanced wine with good concentration.
Tamboerskloof Mouvèrdre (meevaller) 2020
The Mourvèdre 2020 is exceptional in that the weight and texture is so surprisingly accompanied by such freshness. When looking at the light colour and the attractive strawberry and spice on the nose, one would expect it to be light bodied. However, the leather and tobacco box notes then hint to what you could expect. The entry of the wine is fresh, moving to good weight on the mid-pallet and texture all-round. The finish lingers on gloriously with chocolate and cherry.
Although The Kleinood Nocturne was commissioned specially for the Tamboerskloof John Spicer Syrah 2015, it makes for a special moment with any of the Tamboerskloof wines.
So, pour a glass of your favourite Tamboerskloof wine, sit down in your special chair, put your feet up, turn on the music and allow yourself to be seduced by the gentle aroma of the wine the with the first tender notes of the Kleinood Nocturne. Listen, hear the farm and live the full Kleinood experience, from sunrise to sunset, while you slowly sip and savour the wine and simply watch the world go by.
Make this moment more than just having a glass of wine.
FROM THE FOREST
David George Haskell writes in The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors;
“The notion of listening to trees is neither metaphysical abstraction nor mere metaphor. For the Homeric Greeks, vibrations in air contained the measure and memory of a person’s life.
I turned my ear to trees, seeking these. I found no heroes, no individuals around whom history pivots. Instead, living memories of trees, manifest in their songs, tell of life’s community, a net of relations. We humans belong within this conversation, as blood kin and incarnate members. We’re all trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is an embodied network. Because life is network, there is no nature or environment, separate and apart from humans.
Our bodies and minds, our Science and Art, are as natural and wild as they ever were. We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.”
On Kleinood this has been the year of the forest.
As small as it may be, it is a very special place for all of us – a sanctuary we respect and wish to restore and protect.
It has been a year of planting trees and celebrating the natural beauty of the rivers, animals and everything that lives and grows there.
We removed all the alien vegetation, which consisted mainly of Poplar trees that were slowly taking over everything and planted indigenous trees, bulbs and ferns. Now, there are Yellow Woods, Stink Woods, Waterberries, Assegaaibos, Water Pears, Wild Peaches, Boekenhout, Kei-appel, Wit Hout, Lepelboom, Forest Elders and a Coral tree.
Within a few weeks the many wild olives that grow there naturally and the very old Oaks that have been there for ever showed their gratitude for the sunlight and space they need to flourish. But, not only nature benefited.
By spending so much time in a specific area with a purpose one discovery led to another – not only alien vegetation, but also endemic and indigenous plants, mosses and fungi, tracks and nests of small animals and birds that live there – things we never knew or even suspected of being there.
We learnt so much. Not only about trees and plants and insects, but about how we live and that taking the time to look in a certain way can reveal a whole new world.
“Seeing the beauty in animals and plants is a form of love and longing; and we can see the animal, as we see the plant, patient and willing to come together and increase — not out of physical lust, not out of suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than lust and suffering and more powerful than will and resistance.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
From The Flower Room
And so, in celebration of all we saw and found and experienced,
de Boerin created a perfume –
to capture the soul of the forest in all the woody scents of growth and decay.
de Boerin of Kleinood Farm now brings you WINTER WATER PARFUM
An infinitely complex and dynamic perfume,
made with endless love and dedication,
stored in an almost black, small and precious bottle,
dressed in a snug coat of hand felted wool,
for an everlasting winter,
to be worn and savoured as you wish.
On Kleinood our ethos has always been to put terroir first in our wine, olive oil and honey. Thus, the perfumes from Kleinood’s de Boerin are about terroir – the seasons, the place, the plants, the sunlight, the water and the soul of our soil. It was therefore a very simple decision to collaborate with an ethical African perfumer who honestly respects terroir and endeavours to capture the natural bouquet of a specific place and time through a delicate and complex process of science and passion. This perfumer was Marie Aoun – a natural perfumer using only truly natural botanical ingredients in the form of absolutes, tinctures and essential oils.
It started with almost nothing – an idea, a passing thought, a desire – a dream of capturing the essence of the farm in molecules of natural and unadulterated tinctures and essential oils.
The world was caught in the first wave of a frightening pandemic when we met virtually for the first time. We all knew it would be a while before we would be able to work together physically. We started to collect samples of botanical material from the Kleinood forest and sent parcels with pictures of the farm and moss and wood and bark and rotten leaves and soil. Marie sent parcels of unlabelled scents. We shared ideas and feelings, memories and experiences and tried to create the essence of the farm in words. Marie translated words into scents.
When she could eventually visit the farm, Marie came armed with precious boxes and bottles of possible combinations, tinctures and oils. We spent hours just talking, walking, smelling, exchanging thoughts, creating and changing small details of whiffs, bottom notes, middle notes and top notes and then, finally, bottled together in the small flower room on the farm.
Whilst teaching us why the dynamics and beauty of the unique chemical structure of each natural botanical ingredient cannot be replicated or confined to the social norms of commercial, chemically formulated perfumes, Marie got to know and understand the singular character and soul of Kleinood farm in all its diversity. Ultimately, this was not only a strange but wonderfully serendipitous process of collaboration of shared passions, but also a manifestation of our shared belief, that in order to preserve the integrity of our ingredients and environment, we can and must work with them in the fullness of what they are.
from
the deep-winter
kleinood forest
the wet
the bark
the droplets
on leaves
moss and mist
the pale
bare branches
weeping
over
clear-with-cold
gushing, rushing
ever-new
silver
winter
water
“There is no other land;
there is no life but this.”
Henry D. Thoreau
To A Merry Summer,
Kleinood
