My relationship with South Africa has taken off quite dramatically in recent years. For a long time I had reservations about the quality of many of the wines coming out of the country. To me there seemed to be flashes of brilliance amidst a sea of unreliability and perhaps I unfairly focussed on the latter.

My first visit to the Cape, in 2005, reinforced that view - luckily I mainly visited the brilliant producers and was able to see for myself how ambitious and capable many of the winemakers were - something that might not have been apparent from the general supermarket offerings of South African wines in the UK at the time.