Jonge Gezellen, Schoongezicht, Rustenberg . . . and precious few others. Ten years later, another book was produced: Estate Wines of South Africa, by Graham Knox. It profiled forty estates that were producing their own wine, and an “Estate Wine Record” at the end listed a few hundred such wines.
The “estate” was a concept legislated by Parliament as part of the Wine of Origin (WO) Scheme, which came into being in 1973 (see chapter 4). The aims of the scheme were twofold: it provided an appellation system to assist with continued exports to a Britain now joining the European Economic Community, and responded to the demands of the small producers. In 1971 the Cape Estate Wine Producers’ Association started meeting with the governmental committee of inquiry into the production and marketing of estate wines, feeding into the process that resulted in the first version of the WO scheme. Controls over claims as to origin, variety, and vintage were to play an important part in the marketing and growth of the independent producers during the 1970s and beyond. They gave registered estates, defined then as the smallest units of the scheme, an enormous cachet—and also lent that cachet to other independent producers even if they did not meet all the requirements of estates or wish to register as such. It became established that, as Knox noted in his book, “not all Estate wine is fine wine, nor is it all necessarily superior to the produce of the wine merchants’ cellars, but the best wines of the country are grown and made on the Estate principle.” Meanwhile, of course, most of the farms now selling wines under their own labels continued to supply grapes or wine to the merchants.
Undoubtedly, much needed to be done if the Cape was to start producing more than a few isolated examples of fine wine, and if the number of smaller producers making serious, terroir-driven wines in their own cellars was to increase. What cellar expertise there was derived more from experience in Germany than in France—which might well have proved useful in making white wine, but was less evidently so for the reds. And as for the vineyards, amid all the Chenin Blanc (a fine grape but treated as a workhorse) and Cinsaut, there was a paucity of varieties internationally recognized as premium. A factor that was to play a role in improving the quality of both viticultural and winemaking practice from the 1970s onward was the extensive research undertaken at the Enological and Viticultural Research Institute. Generally known simply as Nietvoorbij, which was the name of the experimental farm just outside Stellenbosch where it was based, the institute was inaugurated in 1969.
The bureaucrats responsible for controlling new plant material and seeing to the quarantining of imports were less helpful in overcoming the desperate shortage of high-quality planting material. It could take a great many years to get a new clone or variety into the ground. The spectacular result of the steps taken by many of the Cape’s leading producers to import material illegally was a public scandal, and the Klopper Commission of Inquiry of 1986 found evidence that “the illegal importation of vine propagating material had started as long ago as the beginning of 1973 and had continued intermittently into the eighties,” with at least some knowledge of it on the part of the authorities. The focus of the inquiry was Chardonnay—or rather Auxerrois, as it was revealed that, ironically, this second-rate variety was what had mistakenly been imported and propagated on many of the Cape’s best-known properties—but other varieties were also illegally imported. Also imported, it seems, were some of the diseases that quarantining is precisely designed to guard against.
Among the most important figures accused by the Klopper inquiry were Peter Finlayson, the first winemaker at Hamilton Russell, and Danie de Wet, a great innovator at De Wetshof in Robertson and later a pillar of the Cape wine industry establishment. Another was a man who deserves credit for his role in modernizing the Cape vineyard and perhaps even more for his influence on local winemaking. This was Julius Laszlo, who arrived from Romania in 1974, armed with a doctorate in soil microbiology from Moscow. After periods at Nietvoorbij and Boschendal he took charge of technical development at the Bergkelder (meaning “mountain cellar”), part of the large Distillers Corporation. This was not only responsible for a number of increasingly ambitious ranges, but had entered into partnership with a number of leading wine estates (including Meerlust, Alto, and La Motte). The deal involved not just the crucial marketing of wines but also access to some of the best expertise available, as well as maturation (and bottling) in excellent conditions. Laszlo was innovative in, for example, his insistence on cellar hygiene, but is best remembered for introducing new small oak barrels as an important resource for makers of serious red wines.
The situation with regard to such wines was remarkably different at the end of the 1970s from what it had been ten years before. It was a time of innovation and experimentation on the estates even more than in the more ambitious, and better equipped, divisions of the wholesalers, where Julius Laszlo and Günter Brözel were revolutionizing production. The Cape Independent Winemakers Guild was founded in 1983 “to contribute to the advancement of the quality of Cape wines by mutually developing the knowledge, capabilities and horizons of the members.” It was instigated by Billy Hofmeyr, a lover of Bordeaux, who was in the process of abandoning his career as a quantity surveyor in favor of developing his recently acquired small Paarl farm, Welgemeend. It was Hofmeyr who brought out, in 1979, not only the Cape’s first Bordeaux-style blend, but also its first blend of Pinotage with other varieties in the attempt to make a local interpretation of a classic southern Rhône wine. The Bordeaux blend was to be taken up enthusiastically through the 1980s, but the forerunner of the “Cape blend” was not to be much copied until the 1990s. (The guild was to drop “Independent” from its name and, particularly through its annual auction, arguably put greater stress on marketing its members’ wines than on advancing winemaking skills.)
In many ways, the 1980s can be seen as a period of consolidation of the 1970s innovations, as well as preparation of the conditions that helped make possible the massive breakthrough of the 1990s, when political liberation at home opened the wine industry to the world. At this stage, of course, the situation in terms of exports was getting worse for the producers. The informal sanctions that had begun as early as 1963 took on greater, formal force starting in 1985: exports—apart from shady dealings with Eastern Europe—fell between 1964 and 1989 by about two-thirds. Other changes were more positive for the industry. The WO system continued to elaborate itself in terms of both appellations and controls. The limited market in quotas mentioned above did allow a small amount of innovation from the likes of Hamilton Russell, though independent producers of high-quality wines continued to be severely hampered by the quota system. The number of small producers was nonetheless growing, and the manufacturing wholesalers’ share of the market was falling. KWV power had severely limited the number of wholesalers from the early years, and complicated restructuring deals in the 1970s had resulted in the amalgamation of the two overwhelmingly largest of them, Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery and Distillers/Oude Meester, into one monopolistic entity, Cape Wine and Distillers. But this marriage was annulled in 1988—in the name of the free market, although the same shareholders retained control of both SFW and Distillers. The only competing companies of note were Gilbey (part-owned by those same shareholders), and Union Wines and Douglas Green (which soon united as Douglas Green Bellingham).
The small local market (in the absence of an international one) for better-quality Cape wine was growing and becoming more exigeant. The indispensable guide to South African wine inaugurated by John and Erica Platter in 1980 rapidly became an annual one. The tenth anniversary edition of the Platter Guide briefly looked back at a decade that had seen the number of wines it described rise from 1,250 to about 4,000, and noted:
Progress and proliferation, yes, both dramatic and erratic. Our first edition recorded one Cape chardonnay. There are now 40. And who would have guessed then that chenin blanc . . . would be overshadowed so rapidly and emphatically, as a dry white wine, by sauvignon blanc, which accounted for four labels then and 121 now. Only one methode champenoise sparkling wine featured in the first edition; there are now 17. The classic (Bordeaux) claret blend, a commonplace today . . . had yet to make its appearance, and amongst its first successful producers was an estate which hadn’t bottled a single vintage by 1980. Nor, for that matter, had some of our finest quality cellars in other categories—pinot noir, chardonnay, etc.
Nonetheless,
