Two years ago, La Vigne wine estate in Franschhoek was on the market. But instead of selling it, its owner, Norwegean Robert Jørgensen, will now be using it to train foreign students in the art of wine making.
Robert, a former sound engineer and educator, is best known in the valley for playing classical music to his maturing wine in the belief that it changes the wine in a positive way. He even went so far as to build a new wall at his cellar to control the sound - which has to be played at more than 90 decibels to penetrate the oak casks. Each vintage is matured for 12 months to a different composer.
Before acquiring La Vigne in 2004, Robert was involved in private education. Over a period of 20 years, he established 10 performing arts colleges under the banner of the Nordic Institute for Stage and Studio. Today it has a turnover of around R100m a year and is the leading institute of its kind in Scandinavia.
He scaled back his involvement in education when he bought La Vigne, finally selling his shares in the business in 2008. But Robert is a serial entrepreneur and once he gets a business idea in his head he finds the challenge of realising it irresistible.
“When I sold my stake I thought that’s it with education, but having attended wine courses in SA I realised that with more than 10 000 people in Norway either selling, importing or serving wine, and with no proper wine academy, that there was a market to provide training. I couldn’t keep away from starting my eleventh private college.”
Called the Nørsk Vinfagskole (Norwegean Wine Vocational School), the academy plans to enrol about 70 full-time students in its first year and for that to grow to 150 by the second year.
The course can be taken as one or two six-month semesters. The first semester will allow graduates to obtain a certificate or diploma that covers the serving, selling, importing or distribution of wine in Norway. It is targeted at chefs, wine waiters or anyone working in the industry. Robert has employed two top Scandinavian Masters of Wine as lecturers and says students will get to sample more than 500 wines and spirits on the course. The academy will also be the first to offer an entire diploma course through interactive e-learning.
The second semester is a six-month diploma course in wine making. Up to 12 students will be invited to join a harvest at La Vigne in Franschhoek for 6 – 8 weeks to observe how its award-winning winemaker, Ossie Sauermann, does things first-hand.
“I thought this would be an excellent way of sharing my enthusiasm for wine and even though ours is a small cellar (making 20 000 bottles a year), students will be able to see the entire wine-making process - from harvesting to fermentation, bottling, labelling, packaging – all on the same estate,” Robert explains.
“What drives me is the pleasure of making something happen from a good idea,” he adds. “Obviously it’s important that the venture turns a profit, and it will also increase the level of knowledge about wine in Norway, but what’s really driving me is the process of seeing an idea come to fruition.”
At the same time, Robert has formed the International Wine Academy which in time will offer wine courses to students all over the world via the Internet. For the past year, one of Norway’s leading e-learning experts, Kai Wahl, has been working on this project for Robert.
“It is time-consuming and very expensive to produce this type of high-quality interactive e-earning,” he explains. “We are busy working on a virtual wine cellar where students will be able to click on a link and enter a different part of the cellar, and even see what the chemical outcome is depending on how you treat the grapes, juice or wine.”
Ultimately it requires a TV crew to go around the wine world filming. “We would do recordings in our own cellar at La Vigne, but that’s two years down the line,” Robert says. “We will pilot it in Norway first.”
Students will be taught traditional wine making approaches, though of course at La Vigne they will also be exposed to Robert’s musical wine experiment.
A perfectionist with a deep curiosity about things and a scientific bent, has resulted in Robert taking the experiment further than many others would have. Not content to just play music in his cellar and use this as a clever marketing ploy to differentiate his wine, Robert is determined to prove scientifically that wine tastes better as a result of listening to music.
He has gone to great lengths to get special speakers and fittings created so that he can fit certain barrels with them, while allowing other barrels with the same wine to mature in silence. Once these wines have matured, Robert plans to ask Stellenbsoch University to arbitrate a blind tasting of the musical wine versus the rest.
“It will be difficult to admit to it if playing music reduces the quality of the wine,” he says, but this is not his expectation. So far his wines have garnered surprising accolades.