Voisin’s development has been beautifully simple, simply organic. Jaco and Sarah Smit looked at each other, not exactly in despair but in 2020 hard lockdown resignation, within their tiny flat then. Well, the rest of the world had also been paused by Covid. The Smit couple resolved then and there to eat good sourdough bread, as many other people resolved at the time. Jaco would learn to bake it well, as many others were doing too.

The two couldn’t eat it all. They would share the bread with the neighbours who were made hungry by the aroma of freshly baked bread. The neighbours paid for it. Somehow there was a new goodness about this, a new way of sharing life.

Many people had much time and some used it to reimagine what had been, what was and what could possibly be. Jaco and his wife saw that life might be basic but it could be better. It might be more neighbourly, for instance. Simple things had started mattering more.

The straits of their circumstance were soon to ease. However, like many others in the world, they knew something had changed and that they had changed along with it.

The new beginning at 44 Stanley included the excellent bread that Jaco baked plus what he already knew well, which was very good South African wines. So it was to be bread and wine. And who knew what else might develop organically, quite naturally. Sarah’s renewed sense of simplicity in aesthetics and design was perfect for this unfolding project.

It’s how Voisin strikes me when I meet Jaco Smit. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

It’s how Voisin strikes me when I meet Jaco Smit. But I am to return and return, struck by the purity or simplicity of it all and by how attractive those aspects are now. Voisin means I Could. And they can.

A baker-patissier chef, Mieke Van Nieuwenkerk, joined Jaco, taking over the bread making and leaving him freer to be the wine expert he is. They may look different but I marvel when I see both of them busy, at how inwardly content and confident, rather than introverted, both are. There is no showiness, yet both are exceptionally, quietly proficient, knowledgeable and experienced, one way or another. Van Nieuwenkerk qualified at Tukkies, trained by the well-known chef-maker, Hennie Fisher, at Pretoria University’s Department of Consumer and Food Sciences.

Jaco, long before the lockdowns, had been making the knowledge and taste side of wine his consuming interest and career. He’d been in restaurant kitchens and worked as sommeliers at some of SA’s loveliest places, the most recent of which were La Fermier in Pretoria and Publik. 

He compliments me on the collar of my plain white blouse. It’s somewhere between Peter Pan and Puritan in style. I realise this description also very much fits this business, Voisin.

Jaco has more truths and fine stories to tell about our unusual wines than I can write but, of the many, one stands out for me. The bottle stands here too, as I write. 

Jaco refers to his Voisin stock as Uncommon Wines. They certainly are. A not uncommon grape in various areas like the southern and western Cape is semillon. It was simply called groendruif by wine growers in the 1800s because it had become the common grape since Van Riebeeck’s days.  Winemaker Jasper Wickens was finding that some of his older semillon was starting to produce slightly different grapes, changing, becoming red. He worked with curiosity and delight at the changes, grafting onto rootstock from carefully selected vines and produced, in the Swartland, the first Rooi-Groen semillon vineyard. He encouraged the natural qualities of the grapes for this wine I eventually got from Voisin. It is his Swerwer Rooi-Groen Semillon 2020.

Sticky little cinnamon and cardamom buns. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

What I particularly love is that many of our plants, though they may not originally have been from Africa or South Africa, do indigenise. I have seen a few in the Future Africa gardens of the University of Pretoria. They become ours. This semillon is doing that. The same thing is happening in the older vineyards of the Western Cape too. I like to think that this wine I have marks a transition.

This Rooi-Groen of Swerwer is but one of the highly unusual wines on one side of the Voisin shop where once The Leopard was, at 44 Stanley. They are part of the new zeitgeist wines, the new-thinking winemakers’ products, not afraid of producing small runs, keeping wine making beautiful and full of personality. As Jaco says about the 550 or so wines South Africa is proud of, he finds less than 10 of them that produce the most wonderful wines that are also really responsibly farmed and whose wines are delicious examples of that responsibility. He says about such farmers that they grow wines, not just grapes.

On the other side of the shop he concentrates on the bigger places, the more commercial names who are experimenting or working on special aspects that are different, usually also responsible and often organic. A current wine estate of the year is Kleine Zalze. Now they also have an experimental side and such wines are here at Voisin.

It looks as though the people who come in here are somehow like the shop, not flashy but considering and, hopefully, considerate. Many evince the same sort of feel or ethos. The biker in his leathers knows about these experimental, “smaller people” winemakers and is a regular. The quiet book publisher is another and the couple on their way to “the bush” with a selection of fascination in bottles for fine conversations, as well as some of the well-travelling sourdough loaves. Here’s also the reluctantly hurried, would-be tarried bread buyer who gasp-sighs very audibly with relief to acquire the last two loaves of the day’s batch, then lingers over everything she sees in the shop.

Bread with style at Voisin. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

At present Voisin or rather Van Nieuwenkerk, as the baker is using flour from the Champagne Valley Stonemill in the Drakensberg for the wonderful loaves. However, she and Jaco are also great fans of the Lowerland grains and flour from Prieska wheat grower, Bertie Coetzee. I’d love to write about those too, having once met him and his wife at a Gauteng chef event. He has unique varieties of non-hybridised wheats and it’s all natural, all the way to your loaf. Van Nieuwenkerk and Jaco love his hard winter red, delicious for bread, and his Khorasan Field Blend of khorasan, witwol wheat, red and rye. Khorasan is, by the way, an ancient form of durum.

One day Jaco and I taste wines from cans. We have that conversation, the things people say, the conversation about metallic tastes getting into their wine. It’s like the one about corks or no-cork corks or screwtops. The canned wines I like are Dawn Patrol, also from the Swartland. The 2020 Chenin Blanc is what I want for my next picnic. But we agree that the 2021 canned Dawn Patrol Cinsault Rosé is maybe even more interesting, both from really old bush vines. “Why not throw in one by the AA Badenhorst cousins, Hein and Adi, if it’s a special picnic?” Yes, we love their Secateurs reds and this is their Curator, also a 2020 rosé in a tin. “Why should the UK and Canada get all our great canned wines?” asks Jaco, flipping his thumb under another ring-pull.

I cross the path from the wine and bread place to what has been Voisin’s sit-down meals cafe, Ici, featuring many dishes celebrating the Voisin bread. I’m going specially to eat Ici’s croque monsieur that I saw at a neighbouring table last time. Ici is not going to be doing this for long so I consume with some sadness, the most delicious example I’ve had, mountainously rustic and tasting of a professional kitchen, thanks perhaps to its excellently buttery béchamel soaking into the wonderful bread. There is a scattering of fresh lovage on the whole ensemble. Bye bye croque monsieur but there’ll probably be a great hello to a lot else soon, if Jaco’s plans materialise.

Another Saturday, I taste wines from one of my favourite wine farms, though one of the bigger ones on That Side of the shop, Villiera. Alexander, a fourth generation Grier, overseen by Jeff, as cellarmaster, has these little-known three Stand Alone wines, a Gamay, a Pinot Noir and a Pinotage. This Grier, like most of the new moderns, believes in minimal intervention throughout the entire winemaking process. This is how our new characterful wines are coming into being. Karen Green who is sort of Villiera, Gauteng, is doing this tasting inside Voisin.

The neighbouring Bioscope at 44 Stanley is also often the scene of Voisin’s wine taste sessions.

A friend who is here mainly for the prized pain au chocolat by Van Nieuwenkerk, looks at the wines. “I’ve never seen so many wines I’ve never heard of.” He asks me if I’ve noticed that on some of the labels are listed only five barrels and that “others are marked as say 275 out of 800 bottles, like a sort of limited edition”.

While he corners the pains au chocolat, I notice Van Nieuwenkerk bringing over from her baking area within the shop a tray of droolworthy cinnamon and cardamom buns with candied lemon zest glaze. I talk him into a patisserie tasting if he gets the pains au chocolat and I get the buns. Both of us are getting sourdough bread anyway. 

I have a dream pain au chocolat pedestal that has had only two on it for a long, long while. They’ve both suddenly been toppled by these of Van Nieuwenkerk’s. Hers are cornet shaped instead of the usual package shape, with a Callebaut choc ganache wound through the rollings. Eaten warm, they are simply heaven. But heaven has already been associated with the sticky little cinnamon and cardamom buns, trailing long strands of homemade lemony zest I saw that Van Nieuwenkerk makes and keeps in a jar near the ovens.

Apart from the lovage strewn on my croque monsieur, I haven’t been able to find let alone throw any in an omelette or on a roast chicken for more than a decade. I now have some sold to me in sachets at Voisin. It’s put together by the same person who also makes cutely packaged boxes of teas called Cup Classique, also sold at Voisin.

That is really part of the new concept for Ici. Perhaps. It’s not signed or sealed yet or even fully decided but Jaco does think he could divide the bread and the wines between the two places and have more deli products available. I know there’ll be tins of sardines among the hams and cheeses and things. He’s more than once mentioned how lovely it is to eat fresh sourdough with sardines. I fully agree.

My sourdough loaf was attacked, fresh and overstuffed as a giant sandwich on the day of purchase, with tomatoes and egg and cheese, then later just with some tasty olive oil and a few salt flakes. It is now ready for its second day meal of a bit of lemon relish I have and some anchovies, the idea courtesy Jaco’s sardines.  

All through the visits to Voisin and its delicious basic idea of the outrageously good bread and those “uncommon” wines, I kept, on the other hand, remembering the days of trite and glibly quoted Omar Khayyam about the jug of wine and the loaf of bread – and Thou, of course. 

One of my good friends had her entire wedding fully inspired by Khayyam and these ingredients played vital roles. This is before Khayyam was discredited with ever existing and maybe, instead, being a kind of repository of essays and poems over different times by many different people, lumped together as the ruba’iyyat of Omar Khayyam. 

The bit that comes after the usual quote is nice, whoever wrote it. It goes, after the wine jug and the bread loaf and thou,

Beside me singing in the Wilderness – O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

I don’t suppose the people of Voisin were musing about that as they developed their simply lovely goods that fit well with our new post-Covid world but I chew over it with my sourdough. I find I’m thinking about it a lot. DM/TGIFood

Voisin | 44 Stanley | 064 504 3610 | voisinbreadandwine.com

The writer supports Nosh Food Rescue, an NGO that helps Jozi feeding schemes with food ‘rescued’ from the food chain. Please support them here.