the fundamental situation of the vineyards was changing only slowly beneath this important development. By 1990, Chenin’s domination had grown, and it now constituted more than 35 percent of hectarage, while white grapes in general accounted for more than 85 percent of the total. Chardonnay was up from virtually nothing to nearly 1.7 percent, and Cabernet had crept up a little over the decade, to 4.2 percent; Syrah remained below 1 percent. In the early 1990s the surplus pool going to KWV for distillation and fruit juice could still take up 45 percent of the vintage. Another ten years on, and all these statistics were to be dramatically different.
The end of the white minority regime in 1994 allowed for the remarkable changes in the South African wine industry that followed. In the shadow of this structural change came others: the collapse of the KWV quota system in 1992 and of the minimum price in 1994 were notable moments in the gradual dissipation of its once massive control and restrictive powers of regulation; in 1997 the organization was converted into a company. Although the KWV lives on as a large producer—memorably described by critic Michael Fridjhon as now just one hustler among the rest—the KWV era, with its positive and all its negative aspects, was ended.
3
GRAPE VARIETIES AND WINE STYLES
VARIETIES AND VARIETALISM
The history of grape varieties in the Cape is murky, from the time when van Riebeeck failed to specify in his diaries either the origin or the variety of his imports. Early Cape viticulture would have included Greengrape (Sémillon), White French (Palomino), Steen (Chenin Blanc), Muscat de Frontignan (Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains), Muscat of Alexandria, and Pontac. A large number of other varieties, sometimes mentioned to bewildering effect by travelers, were brought in over the years, though only a few of them became in any way established.
Early commentators do not always give us reason to have confidence in their pronouncements. William Bird in 1882 speaks of Pontac (now identified as the original Teinturier) as “the same as the cote-rotie of the Rhone, the pontac of Guienne . . . and the port grape of the Douro”—a bizarre array. Bird also refers to the “steen grape . . . so called from the same grape on the Rhine.” This suggestion presumably refers to the many German vineyards including stein in their names, and indeed it is far from impossible that some of the grapes referred to as Steen were Riesling rather than Chenin Blanc—which adequately serves to indicate our inevitable uncertainty about the varietal mix of the past.
Any experiments were set aside and things became much simplified, however, during the hurried vineyard expansion during the early decades of British administration in the Cape Colony: Sémillon (Greengrape) came to dominate overwhelmingly. Even so, we cannot be sure of what subsequently happened in terms of varietal planting over the nineteenth century, until some conscious efforts at improvement were made in the last decades, especially through the government farm at Constantia, which raised awareness about varietal identity—particularly when the question of appropriate rootstocks became an issue. The ravages of phylloxera did give producers the opportunity of replanting with superior—or at least recommended—varieties, but the replanting process was slow.
We can, however, start being more confident about which varieties are actually being referred to as of the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1907 the young I.A. Perold, a temporary professor in chemistry at the University of Cape Town who had already shown evidence of his profound interest in wine and viticulture, was sent abroad by the Cape government, which recognized a need to widen the range of grapes available. He was to bring in 177 varieties, which formed the core of a collection that still exists at the Welgevallen Experimental Farm of the University of Stellenbosch (where he became the first professor of viticulture). Perold was also important in identifying various varieties in use locally (and in producing a new one, Pinotage).
But for much of the twentieth century (the KWV years), quantity rather than quality counted. There was little diversification, and a great shift toward the dominance of white grapes suitable for brandy and, later, for fruity table wines. A historical chart of the two most commonly planted varieties after World War II shows a rather gratifying X shape, with Cinsaut’s line plummeting downward and Chenin Blanc’s as inexorably rising: the lines cross at approximately 22 percent of total plantings in 1968. From roughly this period we are in early modern times, starting to move toward the current pattern—though Chardonnay, for instance, was still to make its impact, and the changes brought about by reentry into the international market in the 1990s were a huge boost to the proportions of the “noble” varieties in general and black grapes in particular, at the expense, mostly, of Chenin Blanc.
More statistics regarding the changes in plantings are given in the appendix, and chapters 1 and 2 have pointed to the major shifts over the past forty years, but before we move to a discussion of the roles of the different varieties it is interesting to note again continuing developments in recent years. The leading ten varieties at the end of 2011 were as follows, with the percentage of total plantings (in terms of vineyard area) given in parentheses, together with the change from the percentage fifteen years earlier:
Chenin Blanc (18.2 percent in 2011, down 12.9 percent from 1996)
Cabernet Sauvignon (12.0 percent, up 6.5 percent)
Colombard (11.8 percent, down 0.2 percent)
Syrah (10.3 percent, up 9.5 percent)
Sauvignon Blanc (9.6 percent, up 4.3 percent)
Chardonnay (8.0 percent, up 3.0 percent)
Merlot (6.4 percent, up 4.2 percent)
Pinotage (6.5 percent, up 2.7 percent)
Ruby Cabernet (2.2 percent, up 1.3 percent)
Muscat of Alexandria (2.1 percent, down 4.2 percent)
These ten make up more than 85 percent of the total plantings as measured by area. (Note that the percentages for 1996 differ from those originally published by the authorities because until 2003 they included Sultana, virtually entirely used for raisins and table grapes; these figures are adjusted to exclude Sultana.)
VARIETALISM, BLENDS, AND LABELS
Varietal naming of wines is currently dominant in South Africa, at all quality levels, as in most of the New World since it emerged as an inexorable practice in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. This procedure is, of course, not inevitable, and earlier practices and debates in South Africa related instead to the European procedure of identifying wines by geographical origin—although reference was generally to European rather than local areas, except in the case of Constantia. Baron Carl von Babo was not the first to complain when he commented in his first report as government viticulturist in 1885: “It is entirely useless and misleading to adopt foreign names for Cape wines; such names as Constantia, Paarl, Breede River, and Montagu on the labels of bottles containing properly prepared and manipulated Cape wine will read as well as Sherry or Madeira. . . . Also the name Hock is false and unjustifiable.”
In fact, there have long been some Cape wines named for varieties, either wholly or partly and with uncertain accuracy. Most notable were probably Hanepoot (Muscat of Alexandria), Muscadel (Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains), Steen, Pontac, and something called Frontignac (discussed later)—sometimes used together with “Constantia,” the only Cape area to have attained sufficient prestige to be really useful as a brand. All of those varieties were to some extent associated with a particular style of wine. But, judging by the insouciance, confusion, and ignorance with which varietal names were handled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (precisely because they were not widely considered to be immensely relevant in themselves but were generally used to indicate a style of wine), varietal naming was inevitably
