CAPE TOWN, South Africa — When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill in 2020, Natasha Jacka found herself stuck at her parents’ home in Cape Town, South Africa, growing increasingly restless — until she spotted an opportunity hiding right outside the window.
With her studies at an agricultural college on hold and nowhere to go, Jacka decided to plant a vineyard in her family’s backyard. It was a bold move to bring her dream of becoming a winemaker into her own hands — quite literally.
The wine world, however, doesn’t rush for anyone. It took four full years before she could harvest her first grapes and produce her first vintage.
The results were worth the wait. Jacka’s first wines — grown from vines she planted and tended at her parents’ oceanview home in the Cape Town suburb of Noordhoek, with grapes she even stomped herself — drew enthusiastic reviews from critics.
The response came as a tremendous relief. “It could have been so much work and if it doesn’t deliver, you know, then you just feel … I can’t imagine how I’d feel,” Jacka said. “I wasn’t looking at it like, oh this is going to make a fortune or anything like that. This is a labor of love.”
Christian Eedes, editor of the well-regarded South African wine review site winemag.co.za, described Jacka’s venture as “a triumph of hope over good sense,” acknowledging just how difficult it is to produce quality wine and turn any kind of profit from such a tiny operation.
Jacka managed to fit 1,400 vines into two sections of her parents’ garden — a property that was once part of a small farm. One section was dedicated to producing a white blend, the other to a syrah red. For context, a typical commercial wine farm runs more than 50,000 vines.
“There’s plenty of space in the world for craft and handmade,” Eedes said. “It’s the opposite of mass produced. It’s made with thought and care and typically hard to come by.”
The pandemic hit at a pivotal moment in Jacka’s life. She was 27 years old and had recently left the restaurant industry — fed up with difficult bosses — to pursue a degree in viticulture at an agricultural college in Stellenbosch, a well-known winemaking town just outside Cape Town. She was chasing her passion when lockdown suddenly confined her to her parents’ Noordhoek property.
One day, gazing out the window, something clicked. “I was actually looking out the window and I thought, imagine if there were vines here,” she recalled. “It was a small spark.”
From there, she convinced her family to get on board, and the real work began. She cleared the land, sourced more than 1,000 vines, and planted each one with a wooden stake for support. Her parents pitched in — though her mother Sonia was eventually sidelined from the planting after accidentally putting a vine in upside down.
There were also skeptical neighbors to reassure and an unexpected obstacle in the form of a miniature horse named Spirit, who lived on the property and developed a taste for the grapevines. “We lost one or two vines,” Jacka said. “It was hard to make it horse proof as well.”
Now 32, Jacka has parlayed the Noordhoek project into a broader winemaking career. Her Alinea wine label currently features five additional wines made from grapes sourced from other parts of the Cape Town region, which has a long and celebrated winemaking tradition.
Still, she remains deeply attached to her backyard vineyard, where she continues to serve as picker, stomper, labeler, sales rep, accountant, and delivery driver all in one — a fact she noted with a laugh.
Eedes, who gave Jacka some of her first glowing reviews, said the story of the micro-vineyard born out of pandemic boredom still captures his imagination. “She managed to not be bored, like we all were,” he said. “It’s really just an extraordinary undertaking.”
