Most of us work towards next week, next month or, at a stretch, next year’s targets. Pieter de Bod has to think about 2046.
Every time a barrel of fresh distillate is laid down at KWV, a series of decisions begins that may only be fully judged when the liquid reaches a consumer 10, 15 or 20 years later. By then, the market will have changed, drinking habits may have shifted and some of the people responsible for making that brandy may no longer be working in the cellar. For de Bod, KWV’s Brandy Master, thinking that far ahead is simply part of the job.
“Every time we lay down a barrel of fresh distillate today, we are making a decision for a consumer who will buy that bottle twenty years from now,” he says.
It is a particularly interesting way to work in 2026, when speed has become a measure of progress across almost every industry. Technology can analyse information in seconds, businesses are expected to respond to consumers almost immediately and products can move from idea to market faster than ever.
Brandy refuses to play along.
“You cannot use technology to speed up the relationship between raw spirit, French oak and oxygen,” says de Bod. “Over 10, 15 or 20 years, the spirit slowly breathes in and out of the wood.”
A job that began with curiosity
De Bod did not set out to become a Brandy Master. He studied winemaking at Stellenbosch before joining the former Stellenbosch Farmers Winery as an assistant winemaker at Goudini. There was also a distillery on the premises, and he became fascinated by what happened to wine once it entered the distillation process.
“With wine, it stops after fermentation and bottling, but with brandy that same wine can be transformed by distilling it, then maturing it and only after a few years blending and bottling it.”
That interest became a career built around understanding what happens during those intervening years.
The public-facing image of a Brandy Master may involve a glass, a nose and an experienced palate, but those are only part of de Bod’s job. Behind them sit people, processes, equipment, regulations and thousands of oak barrels that need to be monitored and managed. There is natural evaporation to account for, changing conditions to consider and stocks that need to be planned years before anyone knows exactly what the market will require.
It is part chemistry, part logistics and part forecasting, complicated by the fact that the raw material never behaves exactly the same way twice. Harvests differ, weather changes and individual barrels develop their own characteristics. Consistency therefore does not come from following an identical recipe every year. It requires knowing how to respond to those differences without losing the character expected from the finished brandy.
For KWV, part of the answer lies in what de Bod calls its “liquid library”, reserves of ageing brandies that give the blending team different components to work with when building and maintaining a particular style.
When science isn’t enough
De Bod describes blending as the point “where science meets art”. Technical knowledge provides the data, laboratory precision and standards needed to understand what is happening in a brandy. The final decisions, however, still rely heavily on experience.
“A machine can read the chemistry of a brandy, but it cannot tell you if it has soul,” he says.
When de Bod begins building a blend, he considers flavour and mouthfeel, but also what will happen after different barrels are brought together. Those components continue to react and develop as they marry, meaning what he tastes in front of him today will continue to change before it reaches the bottle. His nose, as he puts it, has to “look into the future”.
Technology has made parts of the job more precise, but it cannot replicate the sensory memory built through years of working with different spirits and barrels. That knowledge develops through smelling, tasting and comparing, while learning how individual brandies change over time.
It also raises a longer-term question for an industry so dependent on experience: how do you pass that knowledge on?
Temporary guardians
KWV’s centenary has made that question particularly relevant. De Bod is working with brandies laid down by people who came before him while simultaneously making decisions that will affect those who follow. In the cellar, 100 years is not simply an anniversary. It represents knowledge and work passed between generations.
His responsibility now includes teaching younger blenders to develop their own sensory memories and, importantly, their patience.
“You can’t speed up French oak, and you can’t rush the Angel’s Share,” he says. “I am training them to develop their sensory memory, to trust their eyes, nose and palate above any laboratory data.”
The greater responsibility is ensuring they understand the stewardship that comes with the job. “We are temporary guardians of a 100-year tradition, and our job is to keep that torch burning brightly before we hand it over to the next generation.”
It is an approach that sits in contrast to a working world increasingly driven by immediate results. Much of de Bod’s work happens quietly, some of its outcomes will take decades to emerge, and success ultimately depends on the next generation being able to continue it.
That does not mean resisting change. De Bod sees tradition and innovation as complementary, with new ideas built on the production standards and knowledge accumulated over generations. KWV continues to experiment with areas including cask finishes, different woods, distillation cut points and blending, while protecting the fundamentals that define its brandies.
“For us, tradition and innovation are not enemies, they are partners,” he says.
For someone whose career is built around waiting, the future is never particularly far away. Somewhere around 2046, somebody may pour a glass of KWV Brandy without ever knowing the decisions Pieter de Bod and his team made for it 20 years earlier.
