Spier

The Free Bacchus Story

Angus McIntosh spent just over four years stockbroking for Goldman Sachs in London, then turned down a promotion and went home to South Africa. He had grown up on a cattle ranch in KwaZulu-Natal, and reading about Joel Salatin’s farm in Virginia in The Omnivore’s Dilemma made up his mind. In December 2008 he started farming at Spier, outside Stellenbosch, a wine farm established in 1692.

In 2009 he and Orlando Filander began converting every Spier vineyard to organic and biodynamic farming, and the first certified organic harvest came in 2015. The farming runs on animals. Livestock is rotated so that grazed ground has time to recover, and laying hens roam the vines in movable coops the farm calls egg-mobiles, helping with the pests and feeding the soil as they go.

He tried making the wine himself for a while, and now calls the results questionable. By 2014 he had handed that job to Spier’s cellar, where Tania Kleintjes has made the organic wines since 2016. The range that carries his name, Farmer Angus, arrived in July 2024 with a Chenin Blanc from vines planted in 1984, a rosé, and a red blend of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Angus made the labels himself, from rubbings of leaves he collected in those vineyards, a technique his mother taught him as a boy.

In Europe the range is certified organic. Ecocert’s EU certificate for Spier Farm Management names the Farmer Angus wines alongside Spier’s other organic ranges, and it also records that Spier makes non-organic wine in parallel, so not every bottle from the farm is organic. The American register is narrower. It lists Spier’s wines only in the made-with-organic-grapes category, which allows added sulphites, and no Farmer Angus wine appears on it at all.