When it comes to the Guild wine, my approach is simple – I make it with my heart, not my head. For me, it’s always about being inspired by something deeply, almost inexplicably, moving.

This year, that inspiration came from a personal milestone – my 40th matric reunion. It sent me down memory lane to one of the more influential figures in my life, my high school English teacher, Basil Bey. (I’ve always suspected his parents had a love of herbs.)  Basil taught with the passion and unconventional brilliance of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. His philosophy was simple: you cannot teach English through grammar rules and essays alone. You must cultivate a love for the language – and the way to do that is through immersion in poetry.

Under his guidance, I fell completely in love with words. Poets like Keats, Frost, Kipling and Coleridge left a lasting impression on me. And one of my all-time favourites is W.B. Yeats’s Mad as the Mist and Snow.  In this poem, Yeats reflects on the inevitability of madness – that it touches everyone, from the unlettered to the most brilliant minds in history. It’s a reminder that beyond the apparent order of the world, there’s a wild untamed current running through us all.

Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “Wine is bottled poetry.” Like a great poem, a great wine reveals new layers with each encounter. It invites you to pause, to taste, to reflect – and perhaps to feel a little mad yourself.