He called many hours later, between two tastings and work in the cellar of the Audacia winery, where today, formally retired, is once again doing what he has done his whole life: experimenting, doubting, observing and trying to understand nature without too much desire to conquer it. If you try to describe him only as one of the most important South African winemakers of the last decades, you will miss the most important thing. True, he worked at Simonsig, created Mulderbosch, shaped generations of young winemakers, was among the first to seriously redefine South African Sauvignon Blanc and later, already deep in the years when most people start repeating themselves, began to explore unsulfurized wines with the help of rooibos and honeybush. But none of this really explains the man. Mike Dobrović never seemed like a man who experiences wine only as a product. Much more he tries to understand people, intuition, mistakes, nature, and perhaps even his own consciousness through wine.
Everyone Should Enjoy Wine the Way He Wants
He once told me how a woman apologized to him, almost embarrassed, during a tasting for putting ice in her red wine. Most wine authorities would probably immediately give her a quick lecture on rules, temperature, and proper wine enjoyment. Mike didn’t. He began to explain to her how diluting high alcohols can sometimes release additional aromas, terpenes, and higher alcohols trapped in the structure of a wine. He didn’t say this patronizingly, but with the genuine curiosity of a man who is more interested in understanding someone else’s wine experience than in defending the rules. Then he just shrugged and said that people should enjoy wine the way they want. That sentence actually says a lot more about Mike Dobrović than a huge chunk of his professional biography. When we finally met at Audacia, in the middle of the harvest, he seemed exactly as I had imagined him from the messages. Slightly absent and completely present at the same time. As someone who could just as easily talk about phenols in wine, Lao Tzu, Carl Gustav Jung or why Africa still works to the rhythm of the earth.
And yes, he had mismatched socks
I teased him about it later in a message, writing that his relaxed attitude towards clothing fascinated me almost as much as the wine that worked. He replied with a laugh and a short sentence that sounded completely in line with the man I was slowly getting to know: In a way, I am a bit of a rebel. And then he added that to be a rebel means to face your own fear and head into the unknown. Before wine, before Sauvignon Blanc, before Mulderbosch, and all the cellars he would later pass through, there was a grandfather on a Vespa. djed na Vespi.
Mike Dobrović was born in Musina, in the far north of South Africa, almost on the border with Zimbabwe. His parents worked in a copper mine, in a world that at the time still functioned according to the harsh rules of colonial and racially divided Africa. One of the first big family stories he remembers is actually a small rebellion. His father was fired because of building showers for black mine workers. He later wrote to me that at the time he could not yet understand all the political layers of the event, but he realized very early that his father simply could not accept the humiliation of people. After that, the family moved to Zambia. His mother runs the mine's laboratory, his father works for an American company that sells mining chemicals throughout the Copperbelt, including the DR Congo. Childhood turns into constant movement: South Africa, Zambia, Croatia, Lebanon, Greece, the Netherlands.
Eleven schools
It was good for my mind to be exposed to so many cultures. And yet, I saw that people behave very similarly, regardless of the country, he said. This sense of constant movement and not belonging probably marked him much more than he openly admits today. Even when he talks about Africa, Croatia or Europe, he never sounds like a man who belongs to only one world. Of all those schools that he barely remembers, only two teachers left a deep mark. One in South Africa. The other in Zadar. From them, he says, he learned that life is a constant expansion of knowledge. The deepest mark, however, was left by his grandfather. While they grew up living between mines, laboratories and constant relocations, his grandfather tried to create a small piece of the Mediterranean everywhere. He planted vines, fruit trees and vegetables wherever he could. Mike would ride with him on a Vespa to the small farm and help him
.
A doctor of wine taught him how to make ajvar
When he talks about vineyards, land or the cellar today, you can still feel that boy sitting behind his grandfather on a Vespa and watching the man stubbornly trying to plant a piece of home in the African sun. Once during our correspondence, he asked me to bring him ajvar from Croatia. Not just any kind. The real one, homemade. Later, he told me how Matija Lesković, a Croatian doctor of wine, taught him how to make ajvar during his studies in Stellenbosch. Such details are never accidental for him. With Mike Dobrović, it quickly becomes clear that there is no big difference between the cellar, the garden, the cooking and the land. He is interested in everything in the same way: fermentation, transformation, time, natural processes, the relationship between control and surrender.
After studying oenology at Stellenbosch, he started working at Simonsig, one of the key cellars of the modern South African wine scene. He later moved to Delaire, and then accepted Larry Jacobs' offer to create Mulderbosch practically from scratch — designing the cellar, planting the vineyards and defining the style of the house that would later become one of the most important names in South African wine. Seventeen years spent in Mulderbosch marked both him and South African Sauvignon blanc. He earned the title Mr. Sauvignon Blanc of South Africa! When I asked him to single out the five wines that, as a winemaker and a man, perhaps characterized him the most, he did not reach for big general places or other people's labels, but almost exclusively for his own cellar and his own time in Mulderbosch. His favorites remain Sauvignon Blanc 1992 and 1993, Chardonnay 1996 barrel fermented, Cabernet Franc Alpha Centaurite, Chenin Blanc 1996 Steen op Hout.
Mistakes are more important than success
This choice alone says a lot about him. A man who was not defined by a single style or variety, but by a constant movement between freshness and structure, between the precision of Sauvignon, the texture of Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc and Chenin, between curiosity and a handwriting that was not afraid of deviation. But even when he talks about great vintages, vineyards or projects that have defined him professionally, he invests much more energy in stories of trials, errors and experiments than in the successes themselves. It quickly becomes clear that Mike Dobrović is not interested in the certainty of repetition. He is much more attracted to what is not yet fully understood. This is also felt in the way he talks about the cellar. For him, wine has never been just technology or production. The cellar was much more like a laboratory, a place where something is constantly being tried, risked and re-examined. Sometimes almost against common sense.
He Solved Problems While Sleeping
Sometimes I would think so intensely about a problem that I would get an answer in my sleep about what to do, he said. It was these experiments that ultimately yielded the best results. Of course, not all of them ended well. Once, trying to get a stronger extraction in Cabernet Sauvignon, he doubled the dosage of a new enzyme for red wines. The problem was that the enzyme, in addition to its expected effect, had very strong cellulase and hemi-cellulase activity, so the grape skins practically disintegrated much more than he had expected. The wine could not be pressed or settled normally for months, and the losses were serious. As he described it to me, I could almost see that cellar full of frustration, disintegrated skins and wine that behaved completely differently from anything he had expected. Most winemakers would recount such an episode with bitterness. Mike ends it by quoting Lao Tzu:
Less is more, and more easily becomes less
And that wasn't the only time he consciously took a risk. While many winemakers of his generation tried to stabilize styles and reduce the possibility of error, he was often interested in the zones of uncertainty: spontaneous fermentation, different extraction approaches, unsulfurized wines, the influence of plant extracts, the limits of oxidation, the possibility of wine being made with less control than the industry considered safe. Sometimes he made mistakes. Sometimes he made serious mistakes. But I never got the impression that this scared him as much as the prospect of spending his entire life repeating what he already knew. When I asked him whether he considered some of those mistakes as important life lessons, he answered me with the question: Is failure ever truly failure or just a different path to understanding? Perhaps that is why even today, decades after he could live peacefully off the reputation he had built, he has not stopped experimenting.
At Audacia, he is doing what he has done his whole life: trying to understand how far wine can go if you approach it with less fear and more curiosity. Today, they make wines there without added sulfur, using extracts of rooibos and honeybush, plants deeply connected to the South African landscape. The first time he came was just to taste the wines and was completely surprised by their quality. Many large wineries, he says, have watched the results with interest, but have not dared to follow the same path. The director of one large winery told him that he did not know how to explain to customers that some wines do not use sulfur, while others in their portfolio do. Mike added that many people are simply afraid of change. Later, our conversations became less and less like conversations about wine and more like long wanderings through philosophy, psychology, poetry and solitude. The Western education system does not really teach us philosophy, psychology or critical thinking. One has to learn such things on their own. Jung, Lao Tzu, Carlos Castaneda, and St. John of the Cross began to appear in these conversations as naturally as Sauvignon Blanc or unsulfurized fermentation.
When I am alone, I am connected to everyone
He once sent me verses by St. John of the Cross about a solitary bird that flies to the highest point, cannot stand company, and sings very quietly. A few days later, I asked him if he sometimes felt like that bird. He replied that life was a magnificent paradox: It is when I am truly alone that I feel most connected to everyone, to nature, and to the mystery of existence. He later wrote something that has stuck in my mind for a long time: If you are lonely when you are alone, then you are in bad company. He talks about creativity almost as if it were a special kind of inner connection. When he brings creativity to what he does, there is a fundamental satisfaction, a feeling of a very deep connection to everything. Perhaps that is why he loves the Tao Te Ching and Castaneda so much: both books are about the art of inaction. This is what helped me develop critical thinking, but also to accept that I will never be able to know everything, he said. And when I asked him what it is that Europe will never fully understand about Africa, he answered with a counter-question: What is it about ourselves that we will never be able to fully understand?
Life in Africa is dangerous for chickens
And then he added that perhaps we are afraid of the dark because we refuse to face our own dark shadows. Jung appears in his answers almost as often as wine: We suppress a lot of things. Anger, cruelty, greed… but sometimes we also suppress our own gifts, simply because we were punished for them as children. At one point, he even wrote me a sentence that perhaps best describes his view of the continent where he spent his life: Africa still functions to the rhythm of the land. When he talks about the chickens he tried to keep on his farm, he almost casually mentions how they were eaten one after another by lynxes, snakes and eagles. Life in Africa is dangerous for chickens, he says. One evening, after a long conversation about Castaneda, intuition and Paulo Coelho's The Valkyries, Mike Dobrović sent me a very unusual note about crows.
After reading The Valkyries, I meditated in the forest above the cellar in Mulderbosch. Here is a brief account of what happened. As I was walking home, I spread my arms and asked the universe if angels existed. From the direction of my house, to the east, a crow flew in. It stopped facing south, about four to five meters away from me and at about the same height above the ground. It was unusual, because a crow had never come close to me before, especially not this close. After a few moments, I thanked the crow, thinking that it had conveyed its message to me. But the crow stayed, and then circled me clockwise, maintaining the same proximity. Then it stopped again in the east. I thanked it again. The crow then circled me twice more and stopped again in the east. Now convinced, I thanked the crow again, but it still stayed. Since I had asked for something, I knew, or perhaps felt, that I too must stay.
Experiences with Crows
A crow cawed loudly three times. Jamais deux sans trois , never two without three, a phrase my father often used, and it is mentioned in the book. I thanked the crow again, but it still stayed. Two more crows flew over my house to the east, and all three, very close together and facing south, began to flap their wings gently, almost floating in the air. I thanked them, and after a few moments they turned toward me and flew over my head. Once they were above me, they turned south again and flew away. I wonder why direction is so important to me. I have not yet figured that out. In Native American mythology, crows are said to bring warning or confirmation. I was once on a farm in my pickup truck when a crow flew past me, cawing loudly. I immediately sensed something was wrong in the basement. I started the car and hurried to the basement. As I passed by the office, my secretary was desperately banging on the window, calling out to me. This seemed strange to me, because I was convinced that I had to get to the cellar. I stopped anyway and went into the office, and she told me that I had to call my wife urgently, who was abroad at the time. The call, however, did not go through.
She Saved the Best Wine
Then the crow reappeared, flying past the office window and croaking frantically. I ran out of the office, ignoring my secretary’s pleas for the urgency of the call. When I reached the cellar, I saw a worker preparing to pump and blend two wines. Our best wine was about to be completely destroyed. He had received no verbal or written instructions to do so. That day, the entire cellar staff was supposed to be working elsewhere. In any case, I calmly asked him why he was blending our best white wine with a tank of red wine. All the tanks were labeled and color-coded. The poor man turned as pale as a brick. He was a second away from turning on the pumps. When he started to apologize, I just told him that everything was fine and that no harm had been done. Later, as I was recounting the whole incident to my secretary in her closed office, a dove feather dropped from the ceiling and landed between us. A few months later, a crow warned her daughter and the accident was averted. But that is not my story to tell. Shamans call certain inorganic beings allies. Could these be the angels we find in Jewish tradition? I have many questions, but I am convinced that this universe is very mysterious.
Towards the end of one of our conversations, Mike wrote me a sentence that seemed to me to be perhaps the closest summary of everything we had been talking about for months: We are magical, mystical beings living in a magical and mystical world. Somewhere above Stellenbosch, in a morning that has not yet fully decided whether it will become day or night, an owl still sings from the darkness. And Mike Dobrović still listens to the world with the same curiosity with which he once, as a boy, sat behind his grandfather on a Vespa while they went out together to plant vines in the African sun.