Since the age of 10, I’ve had a front-row seat to watching my parents, Nick and Mariette van Huyssteen, build a winery, plant vineyards, and create a brand and business from absolute scratch. It has been an all-consuming endeavour for our family.

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“Our Story” has never really been told. Now that Saronsberg is a somewhat well-established and respected brand, it feels like the right time to write a note on how we got here.

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The core theme of our story is generational thinking and authenticity - in every word and deed. Despite many uncertainties, every decision was taken with the long term in mind. It is clear to me now that my father’s instinctive intention was always to build a generational business. That is a rare way of doing things in modern-day South Africa, where too many people seem to be chasing a quick buck in what is in many places, sadly, a decaying country.

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It took a great deal of faith on my father’s part to keep building and investing in the Saronsberg project without knowing whether his sons - myself and my brother - would show any interest in the farm. And that was a valid concern. For boys who grew up under city lights, swapping whatever careers in finance were meant to be for the isolation of rural farm life probably seemed unlikely.

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Luciana and I know that our own son, born in 2025, probably has an 8 out of 10 chance of showing no interest in wine, farming or business. But I hope to instil something in him that gives him the wisdom, at the very least, to understand that he is the steward of something great. Patek Philippe has the wonderful tagline: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” The same can be said of a great piece of land.

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After studying accounting, things worked out in such a way that I ended up coming to the farm. This certainly wasn’t always the plan. It took me many years to realise that I shouldn’t measure myself or others by status or money. Society convinces us that wealth means freedom, that freedom means happiness, and that anyone who doesn’t see this is somehow a loser. I’m glad I don’t live in that paradigm anymore. Being content with what you have is a superpower. It really is quite something to come to terms with the fact that your conservative parents were right about basically everything.

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Everything about Saronsberg - the brand and the place itself - is authentic and real.

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When the cellar was being built in 2003, I remember my parents spending a great deal of time with the interior designers tasked with coming up with the décor for the tasting room. They then proceeded to completely ignore the experts’ designs and do their own thing.

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The art gallery is a similar story. My parents are friends with many of the who’s who of the South African art world. Despite this, Nick is the gallerist. Our gallery is not curated by some credentialled art person. Instead, Nick can often be found in the gallery with a ladder, rearranging works or hanging new ones himself.

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Our brand is named after the Saronsberg mountain, on whose slopes many of our vineyards grow. We didn’t have a marketing consultant or some agency come up with a grand - but fictitious - story to make a splash on the fine wine scene.

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The Saronsberg founding myth - which isn’t a myth at all, but simply what happened - is that three months after my father took ownership of the farm, a devastating fire (one of the the most destructive in Tulbagh’s history) started on a neighbouring farm and ripped through most of the existing orchards and vineyards. Before that, the intention had been to develop the farm slowly over time. But with everything reduced to ash, my father decided to go guns blazing and, in one bold push, planted 50 hectares of vineyards and built a winery.

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“Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.”

— Attributed to Seneca

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The wine itself is also a story of what you see is what you get - and you do get quite a lot. As Gautengers with no winemaking pedigree, we believed, and still believe - although at times we wonder whether we may be mistaken - that the most important thing about wine is what is inside the bottle. That is why we spare no expense or effort in preserving what the terroir gives us and letting the wine do the talking. Our first winemaker, Dewaldt Heyns, and his protégé and successor, Daniela Briedenhann, share this same no-nonsense approach. Make no mistake - to the extent that we have achieved any measure of success, it could not have been done without a capable and willing team.

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Part of how this philosophy plays out in practice is that we set out to create wines that please the consumer — the person who regularly hands over their hard-earned money for the pleasure of sharing something they will genuinely enjoy with friends or family. We have never made a great effort to impress the critics and gatekeepers. Industries that rely too heavily on feedback from people within the same industry can become corrupted. In the end, you judge the quality of your business by the willingness of consumers in the real world, in the free market, to spend their money on your product. People up in the ivory towers - critics and industry peers - are seldom incentivised to be unbiased.

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We have achieved over 400 gold medals or higher since our founding, most of them from blind-tasted competitions. We are also the producer of the best-selling Shiraz in South Africa.

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“All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

– Naval Ravikant

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Part of stewardship, as I have come to understand it, is the responsibility to protect and build the brand equity that has been earned over the last 20 years. That does not mean standing still, but it does mean staying true to the DNA of Saronsberg. Our job is to maintain quality at all times, to make decisions that strengthen rather than dilute what the brand stands for, and to ensure that any evolution remains recognisably Saronsberg. A big compliment you can give us is to say we don’t innovate. Brand equity is not built by cleverness. It is built by consistency and trust.

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So after all this time, I think our story is ultimately about more than wine. It is about what can happen when people commit themselves, over decades, to building something properly. My parents chose substance over show, patience over shortcuts, and long-term stewardship over short-term gain. If Saronsberg has earned the respect it now enjoys, I believe it is because people can still feel that. Beneath the wine, the cellar, the art and the aesthetic, there is something solid and real. And in the end, that is what endures.

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Christiaan van Huyssteen
Second Generation