The vine ‘whisperer’ who hated wine

The vines talk to me through these, says Lena Bosman as she lifts 56-year-old hands to her face.

Like the woman who has spent her life working with them, those hands show age but remain supple and strong.

The second oldest of seven siblings born to alcoholic parents in Wellington in the Boland, she was delivered at home on the farm Nabygelegen, a part of which has since hived off to become Dunstone.

Bosman has been at Dunstone for 21 years… as long as the boutique wine estate has cultivated vineyards.

“The previous owners had horses, those before them grew guavas,” she recalls.

“We used to raid the orchards when we were kids.”

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From grafting to pruning

Bosman was no stranger to vines when she arrived at Dunstone in 2003, having spent the first half of her career grafting cuttings, first at Nabygelegen and later at the acclaimed Lelienfontein nursery at Bosman (no relation) Family Vineyards down the valley.

“I was the first woman to work in the sheds,” she says proudly, adding that she’d never cut herself. I’ve watched the astounding speed with which “grafters” wield their sharp pocketknives and was amazed the floor wasn’t awash with blood.

Bosman, I am told, held a longstanding record of grafting (splicing rootstock and shoots from different plants) more than 4 000 cuttings in a single shift.

All the time, she despised alcohol for the influence it exerted on her community – and especially her parents.

“They were drunk from morning till night… and the fights that took place! Even as a young girl I had to intervene, sometimes physically.”

Finding peace among the vines

One such intervention on behalf of her father in the face of a belligerent drinking buddy saw her receive a kicking so brutal she had to be hospitalised.

After she’d been at Dunstone a few years – the first time she’d worked out of doors – her employer decided to use her temporarily in the cellars where the grapes were fermenting in open-topped tanks.

“I climbed the ladder to the top of one… I think it was the merlot… and leaned over. The smell came up and I experienced a feeling of breathtaking calm. For someone who hated wine as much as I did, it felt like a miracle.”

Now, says Bosman, she enjoys a glass of red wine; “not too often and out of a bottle – never out of a papsak (a community colloquilism for the cheapest rotgut plonk)! Her preference, unsurprisingly, is merlot.

There are five hectares under vine on Dunstone. Bosman tends each and every plant unassisted, moving down the rows with the speed and assuredness she once demonstrated in the grafting sheds.

There are many hundreds of plants that need to be pruned and maintained.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve given every vine a name but each has its own identity and I know them all. I talk to them while I’m pruning and they talk back through my hands… telling me what they need me to do for them to produce the best fruit.

“Even the vineyard consultants who’ve visited over the years leave me to do my thing. No-one knows these vines better than I do. “Each year I come back to a plant, my hands let me know exactly what I did in the past to make it happy.”

Current Dunstone owner Dirk Vaeye has honoured Bosman’s commitment to the vines, the farm and her family – she has a daughter and two grandchildren – by incorporating her likeness in the label of the estate’s flagship Roots 2019 shiraz.

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