It was pure serendipity that led Stellenbosch University alumni Jaco and Petrie Terblanche to a piece of heaven in France where the very earth reflects their name in white limestone. “Terre Blanche” lies just outside their picturesque wine estate, Chateau Lestevenie, in the southwest of France.

Theirs is an incredible tale of coincidence, shared spaces, acquaintances and even cities, and some near encounters. Having taken some detours and established their respective careers, they eventually met “halfway” in New York, which turned into forever in France.

Their first miss was at SU’s Dagbreek residence, where Jaco, from Clanwilliam, resided while studying BScAgric. Petrie had been in the same residence just two months prior, having come from Riversdale to pursue a degree in BCom Accounting. He left for Pretoria to obtain his chartered accountant qualification and complete his articles at Ernst & Young.

Jaco eventually obtained his Masters and left for England to pay off his student debt. He worked as a sweeper seven days a week, from 07:00 to 19:00, rushing off to attend job interviews during lunch breaks. He was eager to find a position in embryology, so before he returned to South Africa, he contacted an internationally renowned professor at a clinic in London, who promised him a job as soon as there was an opening. Not one to wait for things to happen, though, Jaco volunteered at the clinic for four months. “I wanted to get experience in the field, and a foot in the door.” On weekends, he earned £60 a day offering horseriding lessons in Hyde Park. “I was able to pay my rent and still had money left over for food for the week.”

After two and a half years at the London Fertility Centre, Jaco was recruited by a fellow South African to work at a large hospital in Dallas, Texas. Two years later, he returned to England, stepping into a management position at his former clinic for the next eight years. He
was then headhunted by a Swedish medical device company. Petrie, in turn, left Pretoria for California around 2000 and spent a year in San Francisco “during the dot-com craze”. Having started out in external auditing, he later transitioned into licence compliance, internal auditing and enterprise risk management. And as he continued to excel, Petrie crisscrossed the world to ply his trade.
He returned to Southern Africa to oversee the implementation of financial systems for a local corporation, before returning to Ernst & Young in Silicon Valley. Petrie eventually immigrated to the United States in 2004.

Meanwhile, during Jaco’s stint in the States, he met an acquaintance in Awie Botes, a South African-born embryologist, who happened to be a very good friend of Petrie’s. By now, Petrie had settled in San Francisco where he worked for two corporates, running their global internal audit, risk and compliance departments. Their paths finally crossed in 2015, when Petrie was headhunted to work in France for Criteo, a Paris-based retargeting marketing company that operates globally and is registered on the New York Stock Exchange.
Petrie was appointed to manage their internal control and risk management function. Jaco says: “We met online probably around 2014,
but because Petrie was in San Francisco and I was in London, we were never physically in the same place at the same time.” Jaco used to be the chair of Canticum Novum, the Stellenbosch student church choir, and wanted to see the choir perform at Carnegie Hall in April
2015, so Petrie was to meet him “halfway” in New York. “That’s been the theme of our lives,” Jaco says.

When the Bataclan terrorist attack hit Paris in November 2015, this inadvertently catalysed their entry into winemaking. “It made us question the purpose of life. It made the wedding, the kids, everything happen much quicker. Life’s too short,” Jaco says.

In November 2017, they had their beautiful twins, Nico and Emma – born eleven weeks prematurely – through surrogacy. And they started talking about a second career. This led to yet another fortuitous meeting, this time with their storybook beautiful wine estate in
Bergerac, Dordogne. First, while Facetiming with the agent during a virtual tour of the property, the internet connection dropped. And when they travelled to visit the area, all of their other scheduled viewings got cancelled. Chateau Lestevenie was the only property they ended up seeing, and they fell in love.

“It offered us a blank canvas. We could do a lot more with the property than just have a vineyard and produce wine,” Petrie says. But neither of them had any knowledge of winemaking. Enter another Matie, Ramon Scholtz, an experienced winemaker who happened to
be working in France already.

“We both had such great privilege and opportunities to work abroad after SU, so we thought: Why not offer this opportunity to another Matie?” Ramon accepted the position in December 2021, preparing the vineyard for harvesting.

Jaco and Petrie officially took ownership of the property – and wine tastings – in February 2022. They recently released their new label sporting the letter ‘T’, representing not only their surname, but also the shape of a vine, and balance, says Petrie. On the left of the ‘T’ is foliage to symbolise their artistic side, and to the right, an elegant, professional font. “When your life is in balance, you get good wine,” says Jaco. “And that’s also why we work as a partnership. If we were both on the same side of the scale, things wouldn’t have been
balanced.”

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