Wine at the Desert’s Edge

Starting a winery is difficult in the best of circumstances. Doing it without experience, on the edge of a desert that regularly hits 50°C (122°F), borders on madness. Yet for Rudie van Vuuren, that unlikely leap became the beginning of something remarkable. Van Vuuren now leads Neuras Wine and Wildlife Estate, about 140 miles south of Windhoek, where the Naukluft Mountains meet the Namib Desert. There, in what is considered the driest vineyard on Earth outside Chile’s Atacama, Neuras has turned blistering heat and marauding baboons into part of its identity, slowly transforming a remote patch of land into a producer of internationally awarded wines.

The story traces back to a leopard named Lightning. Once a national athlete in both cricket and rugby, then a doctor and conservationist, Van Vuuren was tracking the big cat by helicopter in 2009 when he spotted a splash of green below — a small vineyard planted by a retired Shell executive. He landed to warn him about the leopard, tasted the wine, and felt an instant pull. Shortly after, he and his wife Marlice acquired the property and folded it into their Naankuse Foundation, making it both a release site for rehabilitated wildlife and a potential source of funding for their conservation projects. For years they learned as they went, until South African winemaker Braam Gericke joined and elevated the project. Under his guidance, grapes are protected under netting, harvested by hand at dawn, and aged more than a year before being bottled manually — barely 200 bottles per label. His philosophy is simple: let the place guide the wine. Neuras’ real treasure is the ancient freshwater beneath it. With rainfall sometimes as low as 5 mm a year, five underground springs feed the vineyard’s drip-irrigation system. A water study eventually made it clear that the vineyard could never grow larger without upsetting the delicate equilibrium. So the estate embraced its scale, choosing to refine rather than expand.

Climate change adds another layer of uncertainty. As many wine regions rethink their future, Neuras leans into adaptation: carefully managing water, responding to the vines’ cues, and experimenting with resilient varieties like Pinotage designed for dry conditions. Van Vuuren sees it not as a limitation, but as a lesson. In a place where nature sets the boundaries, excellence comes from working with it — and letting ingenuity, patience, and the landscape itself shape every bottle.