Greg Sherwood MW: Shifts in the Southern Rhône and what SA wine can learn
By Greg Sherwood, 8 October 2025

It’s sometimes funny to think that wine producers, regional bodies, and certainly consumers in South Africa so often look to the classical Old-World regions of France, Germany, Spain, and Italy for inspiration, stylistic guidance, or even spiritual insight into how the local industry might evolve. What we often forget is that many of those revered French regions are themselves in constant motion – evolving, adapting, existing in a continual state of flux.
When I moved back to the United Kingdom in early 2000, I’d already decided that before attempting to re-establish meaningful long-term employment, swapping commodity trading for wine trade, I would travel through as many of France’s classical regions as possible. A quick, sharp immersion experience. After all, there’s only so much you can learn from textbooks before you yearn to walk those vineyards yourself.
After an incredible week-long trip through Champagne with my brother, camping along the way and driving his tiny, clapped-out red Fiat Punto (roughly the size of a Toyota Tazz, for South African comparison), we managed to visit most of the major grandes marques as well as several up-and-coming grower Champagne producers, a term and category still a decade away from becoming “a serious thing” in the UK wine trade.
There’s nothing quite like full immersion in a wine region to make it all come alive, and I can still vividly recall completing six days in Champagne drinking nothing but… Champagne. No whites, no reds – just the finest the region had to offer, day in and day out, at cellars, tasting rooms, and small restaurants in Reims and Épernay.
Hitting Champagne in mid-2000 turned out to be a masterstroke. Every retail shop, winery cave, and tasting room was still bursting with post-millennium special cuvées, now offered at knock-down prices. Many cellars had overplayed their marketing hand ahead of Y2K, fearing the world might end in a technological meltdown. As it turned out, we were fine — the planes didn’t fall out of the sky.
Building on that success, our next road trip took us down to the Southern Rhône via Tain-l’Hermitage and Côte-Rôtie, exploring the famous wine villages of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Gigondas, Rasteau, Vacqueyras, and of course Beaumes-de-Venise, the Muscat sweet-wine paradise. Hardly an earth-shattering itinerary by today’s standards, but in 2000 I was still a devoted collector of old South African Muscats from KWV and Monis, and I could still taste the 1930 KWV Boberg Muscadel from our millennium New Year’s party in Camps Bay.
We based ourselves at the Îslon Saint-Luc campsite on the Rhône River just south of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, launching out daily with great enthusiasm to visit an array of scenic wine villages. Undeterred by the tragedy of the Air France Concorde crash — which occurred on our very first night — we pressed on and visited some remarkable producers that week.
I was reminded of that memorable Rhône adventure only recently, having just returned to the Beaumes-de-Venise region for the first time in 25 years. But of course, this is the classical Old World, a region well covered by the textbooks, where things never really change… or do they?
As a buyer for a fine wine merchant from 2000 to 2022, I’d like to think I kept a close eye on the major classical regions – Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhône. Yet even I was astonished on this trip at how much has changed in just two decades – in winemaking, legislation, and style.
Since my last visit, Beaumes-de-Venise has evolved from a Côtes du Rhône (1956) to a Côtes du Rhône-Villages (1978), and finally to its own Cru des Côtes du Rhône in 2005, recognising its ongoing innovation and diversity, and elevating its red wines to the top classification tier.
Today, the INAO is studying the AOC’s 2022 application to include dry white wines under the same Cru designation. With so much Muscat grown in the area, many producers are keen to tap into the growing demand for dry, aromatic whites that pair beautifully with modern Middle Eastern and Asian cuisines — while sweet Muscat styles face the same headwinds troubling almost all dessert wines globally.
Since 2016, the Beaumes-de-Venise appellation has been continually reassessed, and it seems likely that dry whites will soon be officially recognised. French bureaucracy may move at a snail’s pace, but with the wider appellation celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, and the red wine Cru only its 20th, this is clearly not a region resting on its laurels. Progress is being driven by a new, energetic generation of vignerons.
The parallels between the Southern Rhône – Beaumes-de-Venise in particular – and the Swartland are striking. Both are hot, dry regions facing water challenges, thriving on Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre blends, and both are exploring heat- and drought-tolerant whites such as Grenache Blanc and Clairette Blanche as consumers move away from sweeter Muscat styles.
With the proposed white wine AOC has come a deeper exploration of terroir, landscape, and biodiversity. In South Africa, similar mapping work is underway in the Swartland, led by Eben Sadie and viticulturist Jaco Engelbrecht (see here).
Ironically, though the soils around the dramatic Dentelles de Montmirail peaks are over 350 million years old and profoundly complex, Beaumes-de-Venise’s efforts to map and communicate its terroir are not far ahead of the Swartland’s own. The so-called New World continues to catch up impressively with the Old – and sometimes, it’s not as far behind as we think.
- Greg Sherwood was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and as the son of a career diplomat, spent his first 21 years traveling the globe with his parents. With a Business Management and Marketing degree from Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Sherwood began his working career as a commodity trader. In 2000, he decided to make more of a long-held interest in wine taking a position at Handford Wines in South Kensington, London, working his way up to the position of Senior Wine Buyer over 22 years. Sherwood currently consults to a number of top fine wine merchants in London while always keeping one eye firmly on the South African wine industry. He qualified as the 303rd Master of Wine in 2007.
Comments
0 comment(s)
Please read our Comments Policy here.