Meet the Winemakers

Producer:BLANKBOTTLE
Winemaker: Pieter Walser
Region: Cape
Country: South Africa

“People like to label me. Some say I’m a winemaker, an ideas guy, a marketer, a surfer, an actor, a garagiste, a negociant, an entrepreneur. I prefer not to carry a label. To be honest, I wouldn’t know what to label myself. It’s like my wine, BLANKBOTTLE… it’s just a blank bottle. You can’t judge it by the label; it takes drinking a whole bottle to get to know the wine.” Pieter H. Walser

Over the years we would like to think that we have come across some of the most creative winemakers and minds of the wine trade... but just when you think that you have come across them all, you meet the man himself, Pieter Walser, winemaker and owner of BLANKBOTTLE wines. An absolute purist, an artist, a free-thinker, a person who does not allow the constraints of everyday life or the boundaries set out by the so-called wine-police, dictate how or what he should produce, what the wine should look or taste like and what it should be called.

 

Along the way Pieter has thrown the rulebook out the window while driving down a dusty farm road in his bakkie, somewhere in the Cape, on his way to visit one of the many cuvees each vintage, yes 30+. You might think he has got to be an absolute lunatic to even attempt this, but that is not the case, he is an absolute genius and nowhere is this better illustrated than when opening a bottle of his wine, popping on to his website and listening to the stories behind the wines, what inspires him to make the wines and just the sheer creativity and genius of this artist becomes clear as day.