Many people laughed at us in the beginning. They asked, 'Why are you spending so much money just to grow grapes?' But they aren't laughing now.

Quality control is very difficult. We are organized like an army. We have the manager, the engineers and group leaders - each group has 20 farmers growing 10 hectares of grapes. We have a rule that each stem can have only one bunch of grapes. But the local farmers don't understand this. It is very hard for them.

We have one of the best production facilities in the world - it is gravity processing. We don't use a pump. If you use a pump, a lot of air gets in and it hurts the structure of the wine. We use pipes, and it flows freely. There is a 20-meter drop from fermentation tanks to the bottle line.

We came in 1999 to experiment with planting grapes - we wanted to see if we could get the quality. We started with 20 hectares of cabernet sauvignon and merlot.