of a new “ethical seal” that wineries complying with certain criteria can affix to their bottles. The scheme is being implemented under the aegis of WIETA, which announced that the purpose of the seal is “to acknowledge and accredit wineries and farms that follow ethical practices and to protect them from any potential negative publicity resulting from those who flout the law.” Already some major importers—notably Systembolaget in Sweden, but even supermarkets in the United Kingdom and elsewhere—had long been making demands that producers provide some proof that the conditions of workers met basic international standards. Fairtrade Foundation accreditation had been the most important indicator of this, but the new initiative should make adequate accreditation cheaper and easier. Most of the big players in the industry supported it, as did a number of nongovernmental organizations active in the area as well as the leading farmworker trade union. There seems reason to hope that the “ethical seal” will effect some improvement in worker conditions where it is needed.
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
The shadows—above all, perhaps, the racially informed inequality, but also problems like still-rampant virus—dim the brightness of the new world of South African wine, but do not obscure it. With a bit of perspective gained, it has now become possible to see and understand the developments that have taken place, and also to be not so overwhelmed by the brightness as to be unaware of the challenges. The context of South African society is indeed one of them, as is the international wine market and its demands. And there are other problems and opportunities that are local, even if they are not all entirely unique to here.
The history of South African wine is a long one by new-world standards—more than 350 years—and it contains within it the story of a great wine, Constantia, which remains something of an inspiration to modern South African winemakers, not least as an affirmation that high quality is possible at the foot of Africa. This does not exactly qualify as a wider tradition of greatness, however, and in fact the tradition of the Cape vineyards and wine business is above all one of poor-quality wine, heavily dependent on exports to a metropolitan market and always tending to overproduction—and overproduction of mediocrity. Without a great tradition, the task of building a great wine industry is daunting.
All the more remarkable, then, after so many years of mediocrity, was the rapidity of improvement at all levels since 1994. The change has largely been credited to the demands of a newly interested international market and the willingness and ability of South African wine-producers to respond, but that ability and willingness bear a little interrogation.
The ability is to a great extent the actual winegrowing potential of the land and the climate. This is the fundamental aspect that we sometimes vaguely call the terroir—the infrastructure, as it were, of viticulture, which interpenetrates with the human beings without whom terroir has no meaning beyond abstract potential. A useful sign of the potential is when “style” changes and quality remains. There are, for example, undoubtedly people who think that many Rustenberg Cabernet Sauvignons of that generally dull decade for the Cape, the 1980s, were (and even remain) very fine wines. Regardless of whether they are finer than the bigger, bolder, riper Rustenberg Peter Barlow Cabernet Sauvignons of two decades later, few who have drunk both would deny that both styles reveal a soil and a mesoclimate capable of producing good wine.
There seems to be something meaningful in the idea alluded to earlier, that the Cape is somehow naturally poised between (to employ reductive generalizations) the restraint and finesse of classic Europe and the powerful, fruit-driven exuberance of the New World. To an extent, as suggested earlier, it is a matter of winemaking traditions, but these traditions seem prompted by climate and soil. The assertive, sometimes flamboyant fruit that is found in California and Argentina, for example, is not easily found here, but nor is the equally forceful restraint (if that is not too much of an oxymoron) of France, while modesty in its best sense seems to come more easily here than it does in Australia—although, again, one needs to look beneath winemaking. A quality that many critics have noticed in many modern South African wines that are not pushed to excessive ripeness, especially whites, is a genuine freshness—and minerality for those who’ll countenance that description—connected to acid balance. This question of acid structure is particularly noteworthy, as it can point to the need to explore ways to understand and articulate a winegrowing potential. In the 1980s the academic insistence on understanding wine through analysis meant that virtually all local wines were routinely acidified—always to the point of technical safety and often to the point of hardness and imbalance. It was a given thing that the Cape’s acidic soils meant that the wines they produced were correspondingly lacking in acidity. But improved viticulture as well as more sensitive winemaking, the latter often achieved partly through the experience of working in Europe, means that now many of the Cape’s best wines go unacidified, and their natural balance—with a fine acidity—is all the better for it. This acid structure is one reason that white wines, where tannin is less of a vital component and acidity is more structurally exposed than in reds, are widely considered (by me for one) to be the stronger category in South Africa.
So much for inherent potential. The willingness of winemakers to learn to respond with new understanding—not just those who were young in 1994, but also many who had been making wine for twenty years or more—was much more than a technical response to a marketing challenge. It was part of, enlivened and encouraged by, a changing culture marked by huge social dynamism, which in certain ways carried along with it even the largely conservative individuals of the Cape winemaking establishment.
The larger bodies in which that conservatism found its most relevant wine-industry expression did, in fact, take longer to respond. The KWV was obliged to do so rapidly in terms of renouncing its dictatorial powers, but it took some fifteen years for it to show real signs of cultural and winemaking modernization in the best sense of that vague idea. Distell, the enormous wholesaler, which often still seems too monopolistically large for South Africa’s winemaking and wine-drinking good, changed more quickly, and started making better use of the range of vineyards at its disposal.
Nonetheless, it is to a few large private estates with uncompromising devotion to quality and, perhaps especially, to the small growers that one must inevitably look for innovation and real excitement at the highest levels of ambition. There are young—some very young—winemakers in areas like the Swartland who are trying radical experiments: a few fascinating barrels of old-vine Chenin Blanc fermented on its skins, or wines from rather despised grapes like Cinsaut and Carignan, picked unfashionably early, light-colored, and lacking massive concentration—and nevertheless rather profound and undoubtedly making for satisfying, pleasurable drinking. First-rate and fascinating wines have been made from old vineyards whose small yields had previously been lost in the massive anonymous vats of a cooperative. This is a trend of great significance, in indicating both an interest in the past and, even more, further recognition of the primacy of vineyard over cellar in producing fine quality. One of the Cape’s youngest wineries, Alheit Vineyards, declares its aim as being “to vinify extraordinary Cape vineyards,” and Chris and Suzaan Alheit have sought out old vines around the wine lands: “We love these old blocks not only because of their undeniable quality, but because they represent our heritage.”
So there is still fresh excitement in South African wine. It became apparent maybe fifteen years after the first important developments initiated in the early 1990s that a second, renewed qualitative shift had been taking place since the early 2000s. If the first phase of the vinous revolution basically involved catching up with accepted international standards and practices of growing and vinifying grapes, the second was predicated on responding to larger aspects of the Cape wine landscape: taking advantage of the new areas opened up to viticulture by the abandonment of the KWV quota system (Elim, Elgin, Cape Point, etc.) and reinventing and reinvigorating some of the old areas (Tulbagh, Swartland); making a useful start with the matching of terroir and grape variety; and forging styles of wine that accorded with what was offered by the (different) areas. A third phase of the revolution is now under way. One sign of it is the “discovery” of many scores of those old vineyards, because essentially this latest phase involves a crucial turn to detail—not in the winery,
