I’m sitting with Ken Forrester outside his tasting room on a sunny November afternoon, looking across one of his vineyards (this one planted to Chenin in 1974), looking across to the Helbderberg. All is well with the world. We begin to talk about how he got to where he is today.
Ken, commonly referred to as Mr Chenin, began his career in hotels, after training in hotel management. But then he was drafted for the military and was sent to war in Angola, 1976-1978. What did he do there? ‘I tried to stay alive,’ he says. ‘I had three guys in my platoon shot, but all three survived. We had five tours in two years. It was the best times and the worst times.’
In fact, Ken did have an out, which would have been to go to London. He had a letter of recommendation from the general manager of the President Hotel in Johannesburg where he was working at the time, which was part of the Trust House Forte group in London. ‘I went to my dad, and said I’m not going to the army, I’m going to London to start a career,’ Ken recalls. ‘He said that would be a pity because they will never let you back into this country without arresting you, and we don’t have the money to come and visit you.’ This swayed his decision.
After the army he went back to the hotel group. They’d kept his job open, but there was new management, and they began to make his life difficult, so he left and began working with a friend of his who had a restaurant. Ken looked after the restaurant for his friend while he was away. ‘He came back and said it was the best profit he’d seen, and this opened a door for me – he let me in as a partner.’ His father was horrified, but Ken finally bought the restaurant, then opened another, and opened another. He got to the age of 35, married, with one child and a second one on the way, and then came down to a wedding in the Cape. ‘I took my wife on a tour of all the people I was buying wine from, because you had to order individually from each person,’ he says. He was having dinner with Jannie Engelbrecht of Rust en Vrede, and asked whether there were any run down properties for sale that needed some TLC. Jannie told him about the property he now owns.
So he bought this property with his wife Theresa back in 1993. ‘Mr Mandela was out of jail and the white folks thought this was coming to an end,’ he recalls. Many of his friends were planning to leave. ‘I said to my wife, let’s buy the biggest piece of land we can’t afford.’ Ken was 35 years old at the time, and this was to be a life-changing moment. He’d bought a run-down house dating back to 1694 (it took a year to renovate; the walls were one metre thick in places) and 38 hectares of vines.