Sometimes sitting, sometimes standing on thin crooked little legs, Wellington's vineyards are subjected daily to a chastisement that begins, at first, as refreshment. From the moment the sun tosses its first slanted ray over Sneeukop, the heat gathers its momentum until, by lunchtime, it drops plumb-straight as a branding iron to make sure its scorching stamp of ownership is burnt into man, beast and the natural world. And as though gentleness were a sign of weakness, it stokes its rays furiously until the day's knock-off hour.

Despite this relentless fate, the vineyards never lose their charm. When the sun pales and exhausts everything into a worn-out wash, it is the brave vineyards that drape themselves in even contours — gracefully over the little rises, around the trickling streams, along the boundary lines — spreading their green-leafed selves out to offer Wellington's eye and soul a kind of balm through high summer.

The grape is a very special fruit. Jesus's first miracle confirms it, and His institution of the Lord's Supper demonstrates it. Perhaps that is why Wellington is such a blessed valley. Not only do the most wonderful people live here, but the greater part of our hills and folds and levels lie snugly tucked away beneath the consoling wings of vineyards.

But the history of the vine in our country was not always so rosy. A hundred and forty-five years ago, Cape winemakers stared down an economic depression, and for this reason: when England concluded a free-trade agreement with France in 1860, Cape wine exports to Britain virtually dried up and did not recover again during the nineteenth century — chiefly because of the poor quality of Cape wines.

It was, however, a son of Die Dal, Abraham Izak Perold, who, like a wine-prophet at the hour of greatest need, turned aside the calamity of this chosen fruit. After matriculating at Wellington Boys High, Perold chose the study of wines as his calling. In the words of D.F. Malherbe: "That cluster of grapes which he and I once picked together, berry by berry, at the first colouring beneath the green leaves in December — that same cluster would become the object of his lifelong study and labour."

While vineyard and cutting farmers look back gratefully and contentedly at the harvest just past, and at the prosperity that has been theirs for decades, it is fitting that tribute be paid to the one man through whose doing it was made possible. And so this issue is dedicated to Abraham Izak Perold — signpost of our wine-growing.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer