If you’ve ever driven on the N1 towards Cape Town and glanced to the left just after the Paarl turn-off, you can’t have missed a sighting of Simonsvlei — the giant wine bottle towering about three storeys over the winery’s front lawn on the parallel Old Paarl Road/R101 is somewhat unmissable.

For a long time, that statuesque and rather kitsch feature (albeit loved by many as a photo backdrop and which could in theory hold 80,000 bottles of wine) defined Simonsvlei for me, as a mass producer of box wines and cheap ‘n cheerful bottles...