little breadth of distribution. Some of them have perforce given way here to larger, more “significant” wineries whose wines I might personally value a little less, or even to producers whose greatest claim is sentimental, because of past prestige or a long history. A further consideration: lexicographer Samuel Johnson wrote, “No dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding”; books about wineries and wines are similarly doomed. Because of the way the South African wine industry has changed over the past few decades and is continuing to change (though now at a slower rate, perhaps), these winery profiles are something like a photograph of a moving object, and that has its implications for coverage of both the broader picture and the details. That all said, I can’t evade the fact that my own taste (and probably my own imperfect information and experience) inevitably prompted some inclusions and omissions. In brief—I am aware that some good producers are probably neglected. It should be noted that the maps that accompany the chapters devoted to the different areas indicate only the wineries that are mentioned in the text—approximately a quarter of the total.
The wine world I know in South Africa is a gregarious, sharing, discussing one, so that the views and judgments in this book always owe something to others, as do whatever information and understanding I have picked up. Nonetheless, any errors are mine and when they are pointed out I will have to refer to Dr. Johnson once more and say, as he reportedly did when asked how he could possibly have made a particular mistake in his dictionary: “ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” So: thanks to winemakers and viticulturists, to fellow wine journalists, to those with whom I often drink wine and talk and argue happily about it. More specific thanks to friends and colleagues who’ve encouraged this project, who’ve read parts of it and given opinions and advice: Angela Lloyd (who was particularly helpful with some of the winery profiles), also Michael Fridjhon, Melvyn Minnaar, John Platter, Mark Solms, Cathy van Zyl, and Philip van Zyl. And thanks to Blake Edgar of University of California Press for many useful observations. Those who, like me, gleefully seek out statistics in South Africa are fortunate that SAWIS (South African Wine Industry Information and Statistics) is in one respect an old-fashioned institution as well as being a formidably efficient one—it believes that its function is to assist inquirers, and Yvette van der Merwe and her colleagues have been unstintingly helpful. André Matthee of the Wine and Spirit Board has been similarly obliging with matters of regulation and law.
Some scattered sentences in this book have appeared on my Web site, and a few in the pages of that excellent journal The World of Fine Wine, to whose publisher and editor I am grateful for allowing me to recycle my words.
INTRODUCTION
What is South African wine? Rather, ask first: what are South African vineyards, and what do they mean?
Inland from the Atlantic, some three hours’ drive from Cape Town, we eventually found the farm called ’t Voetpad—an old Dutch name meaning “the footpath.” The landscape is mountainous, beautiful but hard, with few signs of habitation. Wheat and rooibos tea are the main agricultural pursuits. But at the end of one of the large valleys, next to a homestead, an ancient barn, and a cluster of trees, was the neglected vineyard about which an ambitious winemaker, looking for old vines, had learned.
The nearest vineyards to this are far away, across at least a mountain or two. These few hectares of tangled vines were mostly planted some one hundred years back. They grow as untrellised “bushvines,” with no irrigation despite heat and little rain. Though planted after the phylloxera infestation had laid waste the Cape’s vineyards in the late nineteenth century, requiring almost universal replanting with resistant rootstocks, these vines grow on their own roots: this was too remote a corner, perhaps, for the insect to bother with. In other ways, too, this vineyard could have been planted three hundred years ago. The half-dozen grape varieties growing here in random promiscuity were already established in the early years of the Dutch East India Company’s little settlement at the foot of Africa.
Rationally, the vineyard should have been uprooted years ago, but the farmer’s mother felt sentimental about it, so the vines were dutifully if minimally maintained and the grapes sold for a pittance to the nearest cooperative winery, where they disappeared into some nameless, cheap blend. But why were they planted in the first place, so obscurely, so isolated from any obvious market? This was surely not originally a commercial vineyard, but rather one of a type that must have been, for a few hundred years, scattered across the old Cape Colony: planted to make wine for domestic consumption and to sell to neighboring farms. In the early twentieth century the notorious “tot system” was still widely and unembarrassedly used by landowners, who doled out frequent rations of liquor to their farmworkers (descendants of slaves and the indigenous population) as part of a system of low pay and social control. Other farmers within easy reach by ox-drawn wagon would have also wanted wine for their laborers and themselves—no doubt it was a useful source of nutrition, too, as wine was for the peasants of old Europe.
This rare old vineyard, which evokes so much of the history of the Cape wine lands, has been saved for now, and finds a fascinating expression in a wine.
Closer to the heartland of the South African wine industry, there’s another unirrigated vineyard of bushvines where I have stood and wondered. It is on the slopes of the Paardeberg, a granitic mountain with trailing skirts of vineyards, that rises suddenly among wheat lands and under the enormous skies of the Swartland. Although the summer sun is hot, cool breezes reach from the Atlantic some twenty kilometers away. There were already farms hereabouts by the end of the seventeenth century, one of them granted to a French Huguenot escaping religious persecution in Europe, but these large vineyards of Chenin Blanc were mostly planted in the 1960s to feed the brandy industry and a new market for fruity white wines recently made possible by cold-fermentation technology. Now many low-yielding old vines are scarcely viable commercially, and most are being ripped up and replaced. These gnarled vines are most carefully tended, however, and their wine goes into a highly regarded white blend, of a new and uniquely South African type.
To an unsympathetic observer this is a scruffy, scrubby, and unlovely vineyard, not to be compared with what can be observed on an adjacent hillside. There, vines in trellised rows are lush and deep green in the bright light under cloudless midsummer January skies—also Chenin Blanc, but young and vigorous vines of a high-yielding clone, irrigated and intelligently farmed with all the resources of well-capitalized modern agriculture and the unstinting (though expensive) support of the agrochemical industry. The grapes are sold to a wholesaler to make unexceptionable wine at a low price, mostly for the supermarket shelves of Europe.
There are few scruffy, dry vineyards that I am aware of in the long, broad inland valley of the Breede River. Endless stretches of the other kind may be found, though, with high-yielding vineyards vastly outnumbering the few farmed to produce high-quality wine. Growing vigorously in alluvial soils, these vines would not survive long in the heat without copious irrigation; they would not look as lavish and rich as this, so heavily laden with large bunches of luscious grapes, without water pumped from the river and its dams, without chemical controls for the diseases that breed in those thick canopies of leaves. The spaces between the rows of vines are blasted clean with herbicide, and down them move the tractors and the mechanical harvesters.
In the Stellenbosch region, we find vineyards that are also mostly fairly young at one of the grandest properties there—although vines have been planted on the farm, and wine has been made, for more than three hundred years, since an early Cape governor established a huge estate and fine homestead for himself. There is still splendor and high expenditure, as the estate is a showpiece of a major multinational company, but there’s even greater determination to make the best possible wine. These vineyards are more closely monitored than most in the country, and among the few that can be claimed to be free of the damaging leafroll virus, rampant in South Africa. The price of that freedom is continual vigilance; any vine showing signs of developing virus is pulled up, destroyed, and replaced. But the vines are not the only vegetation
