The alien vegetation that, along with modern agricultural industry and urban expansion, threatens the Western Cape’s incomparably rich indigenous plant life is itself being systematically attacked on the 3,500-hectare estate. The reestablishment of indigenous vegetation, and its penetration up to and sometimes right into the vineyards, seems to be playing a part in eliminating pesticide applications and dramatically reducing fungicide and herbicide use on these vineyards.
In the less imposing, bleaker landscape of Elim the wind seems to blow unceasingly. Here, near the southernmost tip of Africa, scattered vineyards have been planted. For a while, long ago, there were some vines grown by Moravian missionaries at their station, which took in freed slaves after 1838, but all those one can see now were planted after 1992. That was the year when, at long last, the authorities abandoned the system that imposed quotas on production, which effectively prevented the opening up of new winegrowing areas. Now some of the country’s best Sauvignon Blanc comes from these vineyards, where the vines must struggle against voracious grape-predating birds as well as the cool, but often vicious, salt-laden winds off the oceans that meet at Cape Agulhas.
With all this diversity of origin, and not even taking into account how the grapes are turned into wine, one must be reluctant to make easy generalizations about “South African wine.” The multifariousness of wine comes primarily from two elements other than different vine varieties: the land and the human beings who have interacted with it. In winegrowing terms they have been doing so for more than 350 years, since roots of the Eurasian vine Vitis vinifera were first brought here, to be planted and tended by smallholders, servants, and slaves. All these landscapes and all these vineyards (just a few of which have been sketched above) have a human history as well as a natural one. As vineyards, they are where they are, and how they are, because of human decisions and actions. The land can speak through that history and express diversity—unless it is muted by farming that has no interest in nuance, or muted by sheer ignorance of how best to let it speak. Learning the language of the land is part of the adventure of the most ambitious South African winegrowers today.
But the landscape is physically and conceptually shaped by human culture—and increasingly by an international culture, for what is grown here at the foot of Africa, and how it is grown, is partly shaped by the decisions of, say, supermarket buyers in Amsterdam and Berlin and grander importers in New York and London.
The past too is part of the informing fabric of the present. When it comes to the simple question of old vines, that is a good thing; and another good thing about modern South African wine is the persistence of some of the independent traditions and understandings established though the decades of international isolation. These—the best of them at least—mean that there is something different about good South African wines, a difference culturally as well as geographically informed.
More troubling elements of the past also persist. The land was appropriated in the first place, to have new ideas of ownership thrust upon it and upon those who had long been using it for pasture and hunting. Later, when many people around the world refused to drink South African wine because they could taste in it the bitterness of apartheid, they were not wrong. Looking closely at the vineyards I have sketched above, one can observe that above all they are all possessions, and their owners are all white men, or multinational corporations redolent of established power. One can observe that most of those who work on them, harvesting in the heat and pruning winter vines with cold hands, are black or—given the subtleties of racial classification achieved here—“colored,” people of mixed race in the Western Cape, descendants of imported slaves, of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San people, and of the Europeans who settled here, and ruled and destroyed and created, starting in 1652.
All this history; all this beauty of mountain, valley, and space (as so many have observed, there is no wine land anywhere more lovely than the Cape); all this complexity; and all this potential is in the vineyards. It is a landscape and a diversity worth exploring—physically, intellectually, and, above all in the context of wine, sensually.
A note on Southern Hemisphere vineyard seasons: Harvesttime in South Africa varies according to the local specificities of the climate, of course, as well as depending on the variety (and to an extent on the philosophy of the winegrower). In the warmest parts it is likely to start in early midsummer, often in late January. February is generally the hottest month. By the end of March, summer might have an autumnal touch, and most farmers will have already brought in their crops, but in cooler parts the grapes will still be ripening and picking will linger at least through April. In May, winter is definitely approaching, the rainy season in the Cape (with any luck some rain will already have fallen on the exhausted vines in dryland areas). Pruning will follow in winter, July and August, and within another month or two the new growth will be greening the vineyards. By November, myriad tiny flowers will show the shape of the bunches of grapes to come.
1
WINE AND THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA
In 1994, in a hopeful time as a new democracy came to the land of apartheid, South African wine ventured out into the world—a world of which it was terribly ignorant, and which, in turn, had largely forgotten about it during years of boycott. Perhaps, though, an atavistic memory clung from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when wines from Constantia were welcomed among the world’s greatest. Now, a figure shrunken from long years of isolation, South African wine blinked in the light, a little tentative but with more confidence than was justified—as was to be demonstrated, when the international wine market made it clear that it was going to demand more than just the reflected glow of Nelson Mandela in the background.
Marketers and makers of Cape wine saw and tasted what was selling in London, Amsterdam, and New York, and the alert among them might have realized a problem. But many were slow, reluctant, or complacently ignorant of any problems, while international wine-lovers, still curious and generous about the “new” South Africa, were being indulgent. One moment that can be seen as symbolic, as well as having had an actual salutary effect, came in 1995 when South Africa was trounced in a comprehensive wine competition against Australia, held in Cape Town with judges from both countries. Producers were shaken, many disbelieving: something was undoubtedly wrong, but surely not their wines!
Various industry bodies seem to have then put pressure on SAA, the national airline that had supported the competition, to abandon its three-year sponsorship. Another international competition that had been planned—against Argentina and Chile—never took place. Winemaker André van Rensburg (whose Stellenzicht Syrah had beaten the famous Grange in the match against Australia) reacted trenchantly to this sulky refusal to face reality: “If a winemaker is scared of competing against Chile, he should stop making wine and grow vegetables. The objections of the better-known estates are based on their unjust reputations earned from wine writers who have been too kind to them.”
Fortunately for South African wine, the estates continued to farm grapes rather than turn to broccoli and carrots. Meanwhile, the most important competitions took place when the buyers for supermarkets, national monopolies, and wine shops around the world made their choices. Too many Cape wines were, for example, clearly made from stressed fruit off virused vineyards where the grapes struggled to ripen; too many were overacidified, in accordance with the abstract dictates of the local university enology department, which encouraged safety above all; oaking was not always carried out in a sophisticated manner—and there was some suspicion that the barrels themselves were not always of the highest quality. Furthermore, tastes had changed in the larger world of wine, in ways many in South Africa were only coming to realize.
The local wine industry seized upon the few years of indulgence it was granted; lessons were learned, and the pace of transformation was astonishing. Some changes could come quickly—in the cellar, especially, and some aspects of vineyard management. Other changes—such as finding the land best suited to particular varieties, improved viticultural practices, and working with better and cleaner plant material—would take longer. Those longer-term changes, whose effects would be observed only
