12 wines with 12 sto Pieter’s Walser’s BLANKbottle project in South Africa has a reputation for idiosyncratic small-batch wines, each with their own hand-designed label. His avant-garde approach and ‘story-in-a-bottle’ philosophy have struck a chord with the UK’s independent trade. He takes a break from the 2022 harvest to talk us through a dozen of his curious creations
I
made him aware of the legal complications
on the blocks. Other winemakers might be
established a following, and it wasn’t about
t’s vintage time and today Pieter Walser has six presses to organise, and his
online banking has just crashed. As is
the case in any given year, he has 50 wines stressed and tetchy in the circumstances, but Pieter is happy to chat about his
idiosyncratic project and the stories behind a dozen of his wines.
BLANKbottle got its name from Pieter’s
original policy of abandoning the idea of
labels altogether and packaging wines in the wrong-shaped bottles. A police raid
of this free-and-easy approach, and a hefty fine and retrospective tax bill followed. But by this time, BLANKbottle had
to be derailed by the enforced arrival of labels bashed out on Microsoft Word.
“What makes us different, if you like,
is that we bottle stories,” says Pieter. “If
someone puts a bottle on a table I want it to be almost like a show. I want the label to look amazing, but I don’t want any
information on it. It’s just to give people a
THE WINE MERCHANT april 2022 36
hint about what’s inside the bottle.
“I want them to experience the wine and
then go and find out more about what’s
in the wine. All our wines are very much connected to a specific site. The stories
about these wines are more human stories, but there are also these geeky wine things. “My true passion is stories, so if I can
communicate those with wines, I’m happy.” BLANKbottle has no vineyards of its
own. “It’s actually not that complicated,”
Pieter insists. “We have our own winery, so we have everything under one roof. We’ve
