The Music Of Sound

I have seen it before and I’ve heard it before, but I have not experienced it like this before. Bottling our wine on our farm. Not all of us have our own bottling plants. We hire F..Off big trucks with huffing ‘goeters’ and puffing things to come to us to bottle our wine.

It reminds me of primary school. A percussion band. Ten-year-olds staring at the teacher, nodding fervently, shaking our shakers, shaking our heads up and down, hitting our little steel triangles, stomping our feet, hitting our drums and cymbals and musical Linda on the xylophone.

The bottling machine is so similar – an orderly procession that can turn into complete chaos if you don’t watch it very carefully. A rhythm determined by the imagination of some absent genius. Slightly chaotic with its machine-made music. Bottles against bottles. Bottles loaded. Bottles tilted, bottles filled and bottles corked, bottles laid to rest in the wooden bin that awaits them. A symphony of movement and sound.

And through it all the anaemic puffing machine, the women talking, the whining of the forklift. Taking and fetching.

I learned something else. You cannot be a winemaker if you cannot whistle. To stop the process. Sometimes you just have to and then start over again. Bottle against bottle. Bottles in a row. Onwards and upwards. Little ducklings in a row.

What a beautiful noise.

Written by Johan Heyns