1 week ago
4
September 30, 2025 — 2:36pm
The chickens can’t wait to be free.
When I unlatch the door of the “eggmobile”, a flurry of white, red-beaked fowls come flapping out of their coop and scatter over the paddock, pecking madly.
My task is to go inside and collect the warm eggs that I find in their nesting boxes. There are five hen houses on this field and as each door is opened, hundreds of chickens are unleashed.
I worry that the chickens will never come back, but farmer Angus McIntosh says they all return when they’ve fed. The coops are mobile, hence the name, and they’re moved every day, with the chickens released twice a day.
The Spier Wine Farm and Retreat sits 42 kilometres from Cape Town near Stellenbosch. Farmer Angus, as he is known (it’s also one of the labels under which the farm’s organic wines and food products are sold), is barefoot and wearing a T-shirt that reads “pasture reared”.
The South African-born, former London-based Goldman Sachs stockbroker became a passionate advocate of biodynamic farming when he read American journalist Michael Pollan’s influential books about the harm industrial agriculture is doing to Western diets.
In 2004 he relocated to Cape Town with his wife Mariota Enthoven, whose family bought the 620-hectare estate in 1993. Together, they aimed to create a sanctuary that would offer “good food, good wine, grown on good soil by good people.”
Their joint epiphany has transformed the 300-year-old Cape Dutch farm with its whitewashed gables into one of South Africa’s most beautiful and inspirational farm stays.
The farm focuses on improving soil health by using agricultural practices that align with natural systems. Animal rotation methods (hence the movable chicken coops) give vegetation time to recover. Empowering the ownership of the community, Farmer Angus sold 85 per cent of the business back to his workers five years ago.
Angus prefers the word regenerative to sustainable. “There’s nothing in the world we need to sustain,” he tells me. “We need to make it better.”
The hotel reopened early this year after a complete reimagining. It’s now a tranquil, 80-room retreat built in the style of a small village of whitewashed terraced houses, set in a landscape of lily ponds and rewilded gardens, wrapped by the Helderberg mountains in the distance.
It sits in the Cape Floristic Region, the smallest of six floristic kingdoms in the world. A World Heritage site, it has the highest concentration of plant species outside the tropics. The landscape around the hotel was rehabilitated using hundreds of plants propagated on the farm, including 39,000 reintroduced indigenous fynbos plants.
The old manor house and historic buildings on the property have been carefully restored. The Enthoven family own the world’s largest collection of contemporary African art, with over 3200 works hanging on the walls.
The communal places to gather include airy rooms lit by fireplaces and decorated with botanicals from the gardens. There’s a pool, water gardens, ponds and lawns for picnicking – just grab a hamper from the Picnickery.
Guests are encouraged to visit the farm, which also features some very hefty pigs and piglets (they may eat you if you jump the stye, Angus warns), free-roaming Limousin cattle and lots of ducks.
The vineyards can be toured on Segway and regular wine tastings are held in the Wine Library. The estate’s renowned terroir-driven vintages include the 21 Gables label, named for the number of perfectly preserved gables on Spier’s historic buildings.
Food honours simple and “honest” Cape cooking, comfort food drawing mostly on produce from the organic Food Garden and farm.
Resident phytotherapist Dr Caren Hauptfleisch will take guests on a tour of the gardens, explaining the herbs she uses in teas, tinctures, fermentations, and products for the Wellness Spa and Cape Herbal Bathhouse, which is set in a small apothecary garden. The signature treatment is an aromatic bath of garden herbs drawn in claw-footed bathtubs.
The eggs I collect end up on my plate, scrambled, accompanied by platters of salami and chorizo from the farm’s pigs, fresh sourdough and delicate Portuguese tarts from the Bakery and Smokehouse.
I might be imagining it, but the eggs taste happy, just like the hens.
The details
Stay
The farm and spa can be visited for the day. Regular four-course Winemakers Dinners with matching wines are ZAR850 ($74) a person. A two-hour Segway Glide through the vineyards with wine tasting, is also ZAR850 a person. Rooms from ZAR5900 ($515) a night. See spier.co.za
The writer was a guest of Spier.
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