JOHANNESBURG – Banker Michael Jordaan is off duty and about to enjoy the fruits of his second job: wine farming.

Jordaan, 43, head of FirstRand Ltd.’s retail banking unit, First National Bank, arrives at the popular Italian restaurant La Cucina Di Ciro carrying two bottles of his wines, which he opens as soon as he’s whipped off his jacket and tie.

“I am logical, rational, cash-flow-and-return-on-equity-maximized,” he says, raising a glass of white. “A wine farm is exactly the opposite. Wine is irrational, the cash flow is bad, there’s no return on equity.”

After two years in his current job, Jordaan got the chance to buy back the family farm, Bartinney, which his father had sold. The business has long-term potential: His wine has already won an award.

Lenders were making a profit in 2006 as consumers borrowed money with interest rates at their lowest levels in more than a decade.

Jordaan’s organization, the second largest financial group in South Africa, suffered through the 2008 global financial crisis that forced customers to slow debt repayments as the country slid into its first recession in 17 years.

At Bartinney the grapes kept growing and South Africa’s 2009 harvest, Jordaan’s first, produced “probably one of the most memorable vintages ever,” according to a report from South African Wine Industry Information & Systems. “Thanks to extremely healthy grapes, a cool growing season and lower yields, truly excellent wines were made from all the noble cultivars.”

While the farm isn’t making any money, Jordaan says, that’s not the whole story.

“At the end of the day, we bankers produce ethereal things,” he says.

“I can show you on Bloomberg that earnings have gone up, but there’s nothing you can touch.

“With a wine farm, there’s a product and I know where the grapes came from, what the weather was like during the year that it was made, how it was harvested, what process it went through and how much time it spent in the barrel,” he says.

“And here it is, and you can taste it and you can feel it,” he says.

Jordaan has invested in vines, labor, infrastructure, French oak barrels and a wine maker, Therese de Beer.

Bartinney’s first cabernet sauvignon, harvested by hand in 2009, went on sale in July last year and scooped the Terroir Award for the best cabernet in the Banhoek and Jonkershoek wards of Stellenbosch, a region about 18 miles east of Cape Town renowned for its red wines.

The cabernet sauvignon is “beautifully balanced with good tannins and sexy mocha chocolate overtones,” according to Karen James, a South African wine merchant who tasted the Bartinney red. “For a virgin vintage it’s a spectacular effort.”

Bartinney, which clings to the side of a mountain, belonged to Jordaan’s family from 1952 until 1993.

His grandfather was a physician in Namibia until he went to Stellenbosch, traveled up Hellshoogte Pass (translated as “hellishly high”) and bought Bartinney where he retired.

“A couple of years after my grandfather died my dad sold the farm and it was sad and I never thought I’d have it back, but I dreamt about it,” Jordaan says.