Kleinood means 'small treasure.' Before Gerard and Libby de Villiers planted a vine, they read the land like a dataset, gathering climate and soil information across the site and matching Rhône varietals to what it told them. Precision viticulture before the phrase existed.
When we visited in 2018, the winemaker had come to wine from chemical engineering, then oenology, and he made the estate's philosophy explicit. Satellite imagery read vine vigour block by block. Drones mapped vine health and leaf-roll virus. A robot assessed ripeness. Forty separate micro-batches were drawn from twenty-three blocks, each kept apart so the differences in the soil could speak. And yet the conviction underneath it all was that the machine serves the hand, never the other way around.
Technology should be there to help implement experience. A computer will never understand the enjoyment of drinking wine.
Kleinood's winemaker has since turned over. The current winemaker, Lawrie Moore, recorded his first harvest here in January 2026 and began publishing a candid diary, the first entry titled 'The Great Viticultural Lie.' We are going back to ask what the data built, and what it could never capture.