This last weekend we threw a party at our “Den” tasting room in Simondium to celebrate our 20th harvest. The first grapes which we harvested for Painted Wolf arrived plump and inviting and ready to be made into wine in January 2007 .By the time we started Painted Wolf Wines company we had already made two vintages under the Borg Family Wines label, in 2005 and 2006. In 2006 I travelled back from UK for a few weeks as I was employed as GM of a massive South African wine company the UK. Painted Wolf Wines was conceptualized later in 2006 in our house in the UK, inspired by an African Geographic magazine cover article about the reintroduction of Painted Wolves in KZN.
In excitement and anticipation of everything we dreamt that Painted Wolf Wines might become, I quit my well-paid job in UK and rushed back home with my family to start the business. We collected together all my savings, and with some additional crowd fund backing from half a dozen friends registered the company, applied for the licences, commissioned labels, bought a few new barrels, a shiny new basket press and some other basic cellar equipment, and confirmed our grape purchases for the upcoming 2007 vintage. Almost immediately we faced a challenge - where to make our wine? The cellar in which we made Borg family wines was no longer available for our use. We needed a solution quickly and I had no idea where to start looking. I recall that I felt a bit insecure about renting space from other winemakers as we had so little money to pay for anything at the time. As we built the business . I became a dab hand at sharing space and learnt so much from other wine makers over the years. Painted Wolf has produced wines 10 locations and stored wines in a further 5 locations over 20 years.
Emma and I were friendly with Ros and Mark Groeneveld from our children’s play school. Ros’s Koch family had owned Donkerhoek farm for several generations, and her father Rob Koch had been the chairman of the Drakenstein Wines Co-Op, one of the first in SA and the site of our tasting room and of Saturdays party. Ros and Mark stepped up and offered us a small, affordable and rather rustic cellar on the farm and in December 2026 we moved in , cleaned it up and prepared for our first vintage. Our new basket press was proudly installed in the building along with a few shiny new oak barrels. The first vintage was a rather Heath Robinson affair with countless rounds of Emmas sandwiches fuelling friends who dropped in to help. Kids were involved too and the whole experience was a lot of fun. The Donkerhoek cellar in time proved too small and rustic for us, and by the 2009 vintage we have moved production to several other locations.
The Drakenstein Co-Op wine cellar had gone bust in the 1990s and the building fell into disrepair and was eventually sold at auction. The historic building was bought by Mark and his business partner, Paul Kempton Jones. Paul subsequently became an investor in Pained Wolf Wines. Over the years we discussed the option of Painted Wolf moving into the old Co-Op building, and this eventually became a possibility after Covid. Mark and Paul offered us a fantastic space on the premises in which we established the “Den” tasting room in 2021 and later moved all of our wine making equipment into the building and made wine there too.
With the new partnership between Painted Wolf and Jordan has come business rationalisation and resource consolidation as we moved our wine production to the cellar at Jordan in Stellenbosch. At the end of May 2026, we will close the facility for good, and with this the era of the Groeneveld family and Painted Wolf will draw to a close.
I would like to acknowledge and thank Mark and Ros Groenewald for their friendship, support, and enormous contribution to Painted wolf wines over 20 years.
Jeremy Borg
