Peter Vinding-Diers, who began his career in wine in South Africa in the 1960s and has made Montecarrubo in Sicily his home, is one of the least likely and most extraordinary figures in the world of modern wine.
Born into Danish aristocracy, educated at Eton, and connected to things French via his father’s first wife (and through her to the Renoir family of film and Impressionist painting fame), he found himself with opportunities (but no real qualifications) just as the 1960s were building up a head of steam. Travel to the East by sea (a trip which took him around the Cape), a self-imposed stint with the US military in Vietnam (to test whether he was made of the same mettle as his mother, who had been in the Danish resistance), and he began to think he might want to be a vigneron.
He went back to Europe where he met his future wife Susie - an English theatre sister working in Jutland. Young and in love, besotted with the Cape and with no real reason to remain in Europe, the newly-weds set out for South Africa - undeterred by a letter of rejection from the KWV whom he had approached for a job.
On arrival in the Cape, Susie began work almost immediately at Groote Schuur while he phoned around looking for employment. An incomplete degree from the Sorbonne and a stint in Vietnam are not ordinarily the qualifications which guarantee you a position as an aspirant winemaker - but this was South Africa in the 1960s. In his words, Sydney Back took pity on him and gave him his first job – and a very primitive piggery manager’s house which might today seem like a squat, but which the young couple turned into a very homely cottage.
After that, their lives seemed to move forward on a momentum-fuelled roll: from Backsberg to the wine research station at Nietvoorbij and then to Rustenberg. His account of working for – and with – the legendary Reg Nicholson is wryly entertaining – and very revealing of life on a Cape wine farm in that bygone era. But it was here where he really began to learn his craft – useful preparation for his return to Europe and a position with Gilbey’s Chateau Loudenne in Bordeaux – just as the wine market crashed in 1974.
He wasn’t there very long, and his next stint (Chateau Rahoul in Bordeaux) kept him for a decade, during which time he bought his own vineyard (Domaine La Grave) and landed up running a chateau in Barsac.
Thoughtful, gifted, aesthetically super-refined and innovative, Peter Vinding-Diers has cut a swathe through the wine world. He turned to Sicily in 1998 after his last Bordeaux estate, Chateau de Landiras in the Graves, was taken over. Seven years later, in 2005 he acquired Montecarrubo.
The estate sits on the slopes of an extinct volcano, which last erupted about two million years ago. When Vinding-Diers acquired the property it was simply a piece of land grazed by sheep, full of rocks and boulders with a few olive and almond trees. The limestone-rich soils are now planted to Syrah, and cultivated biodynamically. The Grecale wind from the east helps keep the site cool, even during the hot Sicilian summers.
