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Sunday Times - Vintage Guy
From sports agent to budding winemaker, Delarey Brugman tries to make everything count for something, writes Neil Pendock
Cuba Gooding jnr shouting “show me the money” at Tom Cruise and slapping high fives all round was not quite how it went down when 24-year-old wannabe sports agent Delarey Brugman and Cats captain Hannes Strydom went to see SA rugby supremo Louis Luyt to negotiate a contract back in 1997. Jerry Maguire was already off circuit and in the video shops, but sports agents were scarcer than rocking horse droppings in South Africa and are deeply mistrusted by rugby administrators.
“Wat de f*k maak jy hier?” (“What the f**k are you doing here?”) was big Luyt’s opening offer to Brugman, while towering over him like a Springbok lock. But Brugman stood his ground and the bottom line of Strydoms’s contract was doubled over a pot of tea. Tea, that quintessential English drink, is something his great grandfather, General Koos de la Rey, might not have approved of if Bok van Blerk’s controversial anthem De La Rey, summoning the ghosts of British atrocities during the Boer War, is to be believed.
But for his famous ancestor, Brugman feels a lot of pride. “Young white Afrikaners are carrying a lot of baggage: forgive us for being white, forgive us for being Afrikaners. De La Rey shows us that being a white guy is nota t all bad and I take pride in that. Today we have people like Johann Rupert who are successors to Del la Rey. Johann is a sort of big daddy for Afrikaners form a financial point of view. He has the balls to ask the hard questions and I respect him for that.”
Born in northwest Johannesburg in the ‘70s. Brugman’s boyhood nickname was Spep van Boskruin – spep being the Tswana word for Bush Baby, which is what his father thought he resembled as a child.
Mom was a legal eagle and chairman of the Publications Control Board, the old censorship apparatus that banned subversive films like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Movies were an important part of this upbringing. “Mom forced me to watch them. I still do. My most recent was Lawrence of Arabia – awesome.”
A keen sports man – “I earned provincial colours for six sports” – but “not good enough to be a professional sportsman” – it was nevertheless sport that paid his fees at Stellenbosch University to study law. After he failed every subject in his first year, his dad said: “You’re too unruly. You can pay for yourself.” Which he did through one deal: with Springbok rugby players as friends, he scraped together two dozen tickets fort he 1995 World Cup final at Ellis Park and sold them for R1 000 each.
Then it was off tot he UK fort he obligatory gap year. “I did everything in the UK – from modelling to being a security guard to being a personal trainer at the Riverside Gym in Chiswick, which was full of celebrities like Stefan Edberg.”
Returning t o South African, no one wanted to give him a job, apart from a brief gig as a model for Opel. With friends aplenty in the sporting fraternity, becoming an agent was a no-brainer. A sort of SA Tom Cruise playing Jerry Maguire then? “No. More Val Kilmer,” he says. “I was the first guy to calculate the value of a rugby player,” he continues “and the Luyt deal set me up. One year later I had 50 clients and was the most successful sports agent in the Southern Hemisphere.
“We had offices in New Zealand, Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, Cape Town and Johannesburg. I was 28 with a successful business creating brands out of people. We had a dozen Springboks on our books.”
It’s not clear whether us was the reasonable fee structure that was the secret of his success, or the modelling agency he bought so his clients could hang out with models. “When I lose, I lose small, but when I win, I win big,” he says.
The latest chapter in the Brugman saga is a wine farm called Alluvia in the Banhoek Valley, just overt he crest from his friend, GT Ferreira, and Gyles Webb’s Thelema Mountain vineyards. Why wine farming? “I got married and Sandie and I had twin daughters Ilse and Karla. I wanted my children to grow up in a safe environment. A wine farm seemed like a good call.”
First step was to buy Le Pommier restaurant at the top of Hell’s Hoogte. Le Pommiers-branded wine followed along with a fine wine shop. “While running Le Pommier, I would visit Margo Grobler, a widow who owned 11ha of land called Glen Arum. When she sold up, she chose me as custodian, even though she had offers at a higher price.”
It took him one year tot urn the restaurant to profit and sell it, investing the proceeds in Glen Arum, renaming it Alluvia and building several guest cottages. Today the cottages are popular retreats from the world of sport.
While the valley is still called Banhoek, a recent influx of Brugmans means a name change can be expected. Former stockbroker brother Derek and sister Sune, a director of Standard Bank, have both bought portions of the Hill and Dale farm from financier Hans Schreiber, who also owns the Lusan wine company in partnership with Distell.
“Sune has more degrees than I studied subjects at school,” he says “and Derek will move down to Cape Town next year. He can’t take the crime in Gauteng any more.” As could have been foreseen, Brugman and his little Alluvia operation are punching well above their weight in wine. “We’re a small family operation with a dream among all the big gums.”
The first development was marketing initiative with GT Ferreira and his uber-bling Tokara operation; Hansie van Niekerk (the unofficial mayor of Stellenbosch and owner of Knorhoek) and Frikkie Naude from Yonder Hill. Called “bring it home”, the campaign was an attempt to cut out the middlemen and supply wine directly to restaurants and the public. Not surprisingly, the idea was not popular with the entrenched interests controlling upcountry wine retail but his forceful personality and passion has seen his excellent Ilka (named after his daughters) Sauvignon Blanc and an accessible Cabernet pop up on restaurants wine lists.
“Part of our philosophy was adding value to our client’s on- and off-trade by taking responsibility for our brands by working directly with them, by not abdicating our responsibility fir our wines and subsequent service levels to third parties. That’s where I found the name ‘bring it home’ – standing up and taking responsibility.”
A Cabernet enthusiast, he sets the classic grape of Bordeaux as his target. “The dream is to focus on what we can produce at the highest quality level from Cabernet. I like thinking that I did not select Cabernet, but that it selected me!”
His latest toy is a Cessna 172. After getting his pilot’s license in June, it was off to Beaufort West to hunt Springbok with three friends. “I set course for Worcester, but the wind peed and directions from the Met office were wrong so we ended up over Robertson. The trick was to figure out how to get to Beaufort West without alarming the passengers, who knew it was my first time out. I said to myself: “I have the ball I my hand. Can I score the try?” A question he’s asked himself many occasions and each time he’s not only dotted down, but also converted.
