During recessionary times and economic downturns, or the ‘cost of living crisis’ as commentators prefer to call it nowadays, even consumers in the most entry level wine purchasing categories start to become more discerning. In a time when, ironically, the pressures of ensuring quality and excellence are greater than ever, yet more and more difficult to achieve due to cost cutting measures at source, together with limited budgets for investment in new winery plant, barrels and other materials, it is exactly this period in time when consumers will be the most aware of what they are spending their scarce disposable income on.
Tough times call for prioritising for winemakers and brand owners. Quality factors, and how they achieve them and maintain them, certainly become key with the general consumer perception of ‘value for money’, undoubtedly one of the most powerful prevailing mantras.
But it is precisely during these tough economic times, that brand owners often succumb to cautionary knee jerk reactions, instinctively turning off the marketing taps, leaving a few wineries to counter-intuitively increase marketing spend, sometimes out of desperation, sometimes out of necessity, which more often than not allows for a wine’s unique selling points (USPs) to be discovered or rediscovered by belt-tightening wine consumers.
Communicating USPs that differentiate your wine from your competitors, offered to the market with ideally streamlined logistical planning that removes any potential obstacles, can often be a very simple and forthright path to successfully reclaiming market share. While very few wine brands can escape the pressures of a recessionary bear market, if any at all, we certainly do see mid-market wines and certain less sought-after premium brands coming under some of the greatest pressure as witnessed over particular periods in Bordeaux such as the early 1990s, in 1997/8, in 2010/11 and now again in more recent years post the Covid-19 pandemic.
For basic entry level wine brands (a segment of production that has never been one of South Africa’s strongest suits) many are already being sold at historic EDLP (everyday low price) margins, with additional room to move further restricted by marketing cuts, leaving additional price reductions or blatant loss-leading discounting mechanisms as an unattractive final nuclear option available to brand owners to attract bargain-hunting customers in the short term.
Presumably, with rather more South African wineries selling and marketing a wider range of middle-market brands, all strategies to beat a depressed market must start at the winery with real tangible product quality and integrity, and in the marketing board room, by communicating the perceived quality and value.
Consumers demand value for money… and if the famous words of Sir Ken Morrison of the UK supermarket chain Morrisons are anything to go by, “offering the consumer a high quality product at a fair price with a friendly and helpful service guarantee,” you can sell any product in any economic market conditions.
Perceived and real wine quality are two different propositions of course. In recessionary times, communicating the message of quality, can serve to awaken the consumer to the benefits of your brand. Real advances in the actual winery are not always a necessity once your product has already reached a certain quality threshold. Communicating what you have been doing all along to ensure a well-made wine is often all that is necessary to reignite baseline marketing efforts. Stories sell wine and build engagement.
Once the broader message of wine quality, whether achieved stylistically through the use of new oak, more modern winemaking techniques, lower yields, old vines, or better eco-friendly regenerative vineyard practices, is put into motion, a brand ambassador or marketer can begin the construction and communication of a renewed strategy, founded on value for money within the products given price points, supported by emphasising some of the wines identifiable unique selling points.
Value for money can often be communicated as part of a brand’s USP, tempting consumers to test this proposition, which if perceived to be true, should in all likelihood result in repeat sales and potentially the all-important third-party endorsement to friends and family. Value for money then does become a tangible attribute of a wine’s promotion and not just part of the marketing pitch.
As no two wines or wineries are identical, well-made wines should always possess USPs other than simply their price point, and most Cape wineries are blessed with an excess of authentic, engaging stories. Some USPs that have been used in the past by various brands that have proven to resonate with middle-market consumers include better messaging regarding: the winery philosophy behind blending; the actual selection of source grapes; stricter barrel or tank selection for final blends; being prepared to declassify unsuitable components; and an elevated attention to detail in the winery across all processes from vineyard to bottle.
Differentiating products during promotions is another aspect that can be important. Consumers in recessionary times automatically become more selective, looking to buy products that stand out from their peers with an appealing proposition. While challenging, bear markets can foster new and long-lasting trends in buying behaviour, something that has helped the wider South African category in the past, equally, buying patterns can end long-standing trends if products are not marketed and communicated in an attractive and relevant message for the changing times.
While actioning the marketing essentials to captivate the consumer and keep their attention is a never-ending job, paying greater attention to all aspects of the logistic chain in offering a value-added service can also certainly help rather than hinder when it comes to selling wine with extremely tight margins. Any additional savings can then also be periodically passed on to consumers through eye-catching promotional activity.
Whether your marketing mix focuses on multi-buys to promote loyalty, price reductions to encourage first time trials, packaging innovations such as moving to screwcap, or value range extensions downwards to bring in new entry level consumers, wineries and brand owners need to proactively go about creating a strategy that resonates with their target consumers while never forgetting to segment the market as one shoe size does not fit all feet.
Recessionary times, with a real squeeze on consumers’ disposable income, as many marketing savvy people are now discovering, does not necessarily have to mean a drop in wine consumption, but it will almost always mark a change in buying patterns. Keeping a finger on the pulse of consumer sentiment both in the UK and at home in the local South African market is going to be crucially important for wineries and brand owners as we all start to put the abysmal trade environment of 2024 behind us and look towards brighter opportunities in 2025.
There were 12 654ha under bine in Breedekloof at the end of 2023, more than either Stellenbosch or Swartland. One of the more significant companies in the area is UniWine, growers responsible for cultivating some 2 800 ha of vineyard. Is the business model premised on big-volume and low-price? Daschbosch is one of UniWine’s core brands and under this label, head winemaker WS Visagie gets to craft some small-batch wines, either old vine or experimental, that sell at more premium prices. Tasting notes and ratings for the new releases as follows:
Daschbosch Avon Clairette Blanche 2023
Price: R350
From a vineyard planted in 1977. A subtle leesy note before pear, peach and citrus plus talcum powder and hay on the nose. Light and yet not without texture, moderate acidity, the finish gently savoury. As ever, understated and intriguing. Alc: 12.5%.
CE’s rating: 92/100.
Daschbosch Skin Contact 2024
Price: R200
80% Chenin Blanc, 20% Muscat d’Alexandrie. No added sulphur. Left on the skins for three months. Expressive aromatics of potpourri, peach, orange and spice. Sweet and juicy on entry, the finish gently savoury. Appealing if not as striking or imposing as some skin contact wines. Alc: 13.3%.
CE’s rating: 90/100.
Daschbosch Mossiesdrift Steen 2023 (R220 a bottle) rated 90 in the Prescient Chenin Blanc Report earlier this year – see here.
Daschbosch The Mill Cinsault 2023
Price: R220
Grapes from a block planted in 1989. Fermented in stainless steel tank, a third undergoing carbonic maceration. Red cherry, strawberry and orange plus hints of herbs and earth. Pure and zippy with fine tannins, the finish nicely dry.
CE’s rating: 91/100.
Check out our South African wine ratings database.
Read more on Daschbosch here.
Do wine lovers still have tunnel vision when it comes to the Breedekloof? High on the slopes of Signal Hill on the rooftop terrace of the Dorp Hotel, I put this question to WS Visagie who was presenting Daschbosch’s new releases.
The Breedekloof brand is the boutique arm of uniWines Vineyards, a co-op that manages 2 800-hectares, of which 122 qualifies for heritage certification (vines 35-years-old and above) by the Old Vine Project. Only 4.5 hectares of this they deem suitable for Daschbosch’s Heritage range – which we are tasting today, namely an old vine chenin, small batch clairette blanche, old vine cinsault and a hanepoot from the oldest vineyard on the African continent. The block is guessed to be around 124 years old, if not older – as recording keeping of vineyard plantings began in the 1900s, so it’s difficult to ascertain dates before that. This, alongside the ‘Experimental’ range, comprising a méthode ancestrale from verdelho and a dry, skin-contact blend of chenin and muscat.
Daschbosch has been in production for around a decade. It’s been just as long since the Breedekloof Makers were formed to promote high quality chenin from the Breedekloof. Coincidence? Visagie admits that while they had released a chenin-based blend in 2013, it really was the Makers initiative that ignited the new direction for Daschbosch.
“We were told you can do whatever you want, but do it with chenin.”
The project was the brainchild of Attie Louw, 7th generation winemaker and marketer at Opstal Estate, located on a ridge in the Slanghoek, a ward of the valley.
The Breedekloof controls 22% of South Africa’s production, and one-fifth of all chenin is planted here. Louw realised that to make a statement they needed to focus on chenin, both the high quality that’s possible as well as the wealth of old vines they had access to. Using his forbear Carl Everson as inspiration he made a chenin bearing his name in 2012. The wine was the opposite of the inoculated commercial chenins of the time. Instead it was made from a single vineyard planted in 1981, naturally fermented in old French oak, then left on the lees for extended maturation. The inaugural vintage received high praise from critics. This was the proverbial turning of the tide; and with it the genesis of the Breedekloof Makers.
Visagie reflects on the last ten years. “It’s great to see how everyone has fine-tuned their styles. I don’t think we’ve arrived just yet, but we’re finally on the map.
“Even though it’s just an hour away, there’s a resistance about driving through the tunnel,” he admits referring to the famous toll, the Huguenot Tunnel which you need to drive through if travelling from Cape Town to get to the valley.
However he has noticed an uptick in interest in the region, quantified by cellar door visits and resulting sales. More often than not he says visitors cite it was the marketing efforts of the Breedekloof Makers that got them there.
The other side of the mountain or ‘annerkant die berg’ was once a pejorative term used to describe the region, it is now widely embraced by the farmers with a sense of tongue-in-cheek pride; they’ve even named an annual festival after it.
And, it’s beautiful. When you do pop out of the tunnel, expect dramatic Tolkien-esque mountains and rolling vineyards as far as the eye can see. Eminently suited to agriculture with plenty of water to spare, grapes grow easily and in abundance here.
This has been a double-edged sword. The perception of being a ‘bulk wine’ region has hurt their image for the production of fine wine, hence the creation of the Breedekloof Makers in the first place.
It also means that Breedkloof crops consistently, resulting in more profitability in wine growing than in many other regions. With this they have the ability to invest back in vineyards and infrastructure as well as the custodianship of heritage plots.
Such as the 1977 block from which the Daschbosch’s Avon Clairette Blanche hails. “It’s not about making money,” says Visagie when asked why make the wine. “It’s about keeping the vines in the soil.” They can only make around four barrels per vintage, and in fact reduced yields in 2024 saw only three being filled.
“You’d fall over if you heard what we have to pay to keep some of these old blocks in the ground,” adds Pieter Cronje, head of marketing for the brand. He hints they are paying far more for heritage grapes than in other regions, such as the Swartland. He asks rhetorically, “Why should a farmer keep these low-yielding crops when he can get 20-times as much for high volume colombard, or even butternut?
“These farmers are commercial farmers, whereas with these plots it’s all about heritage and emotion. You have to get the grower’s buy in.”
Security of fruit
Premium wines with a story to tell have the added bonus of attracting attention. This is part of the reason that some of South Africa’s most well known producers can be found happily shopping in the Breedekloof for fruit. “It’s no secret that some of Stellenbosch’s top estates source their fruit in Bonnievale,” says Cronje.
The other is that the crops are consistent. “Breedekloof is in a sweet spot,” relates Opstal’s Louw when we jump on a call, along with contemporaries winemaker, Ivy du Toit of Jason’s Hill and Ed Beukes, marketing manager of Du Toitskloof Wines – both estates members of the Makers.
“We discussed at the recent Old Vine conference how it is one of the most sustainable regions in Western Cape, because we have the security of fruit.”
“Of course we do bulk wine. With the luxury of water, bulk means we can harvest a lot of grapes, and we need to start seeing that as a strength rather than hiding away from it.”
“If we want to plant bushvine grenache on a raised slope, we don’t need a French aristocrat to invest to do so,” says Louw. “We have the sustainability of profitability on a farm level to take on such a challenge.”
Beukes points out that from anecdotal observation the Breedekloof Makers project has worked. “The stats from our tasting room show that our old vine chenin is one of our top-sellers, remarkable when you consider Du Toitskloof is known as an easy-drinking brand. He also notes how members are consistently bottling current vintages of the Makers’ chenin, whereas that wasn’t the case in the beginning.
Conversely Du Toit points out how the Makers initiative has had another effect: “We now know how many people still don’t know about us.”
This underscores the importance of sticking to the message.
“The market needs to expect to enjoy quality chenin in the Breedekloof,” says Louw. “And we still have a lot of work to do in bringing that message to the world.”
For reviews of the latest Daschbosch releases by editor Christian Eedes, see here.
Kleine Zalze, the Stellenbosch-based cellar owned by major French wine company Advini since September 2022, is one of South Africa’s more successful large-scale producers operating at thepremium end of the market. Its wines, however, are probably viewed as a bit staid and conventional, for all the awards won.
How to change that? The first bottlingd under the experimental Project Z label were from the 2017 vintage and these are slowly but surely taking their place among South Africa’s most exciting. Tasting notes and ratings for the new releases as follows:
Project Z Chenin Blanc Skin Contact 2022
Price: R460
W.O. Stellenbosch. Grapes on skins for 7 to 10 days in amphorae, maturation lasting nine months. The nose shows nectarine, orange, ginger and other spice with some bee’s was and flinty reduction in the background. Dense fruit and bright acidity before a finish that’s long, super-savoury and intensely grippy. Alc: 12%.
CE’s rating: 94/100.
Project Z Grenache 2022
Price: R420
W.O. Darling. Fermentation in stainless steel tank, including a 30 to 40% whole-bunch portion while maturation lasted eight months in amphorae. Red berries, orange, Turkish Delight, earth, playdough and spice on the nose. The palate is striking if a little awkward – pure fruit, tart acidity and powdery tannins, the finish ultra-dry. Alc: 13%.
CE’s rating: 91/100.
Project Z Cabernet Sauvignon 2022
Price: R590
Grapes from a Helderberg vineyard on granite. Last of the free-run juice captured overnight fermented in an amphora – total production was 718 bottles. The nose is perfumed and enchanting with notes of cassis, violets and some leafiness. The palate is medium bodied with snappy acidity and fine tannins. A wine that displays finesse but equally no shortage of presence – great structure and balance, the finish long and dry. Alc: 13.5%.
CE’s rating: 96/100.
Kleine Zalze winemaker Hanri Ferreira had two wines from this set of Project Z releases in the Top 10 of the FedEx Next Generation Awards earlier this year, namely Alvarinho 2022 and Chenin Blanc 2022. Both rated 94 points, the former selling for R280 a bottle and the latter for R460 – see here.
Check out our South African wine ratings database.
This recipe for creamy chicken with ravioli and spinach makes for an easy weeknight supper meal. Use store-bought ravioli to make it even easier (either four cheese ravioli or spinach & ricotta).
2 – 3 generous portions (to serve 4, double up on the pasta)
Olive oil
1 onion finely chopped
4 cloves garlic crushed
1 Tbsp butter
450gms – 500gms skinless boneless chicken (either thigh or breast) cut into bite size pieces (brought to room temperature)
1 Tbsp flour
½ cup dry white wine
1 cup chicken stock
½ cup cream
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1 medium tomato, deseeded and chopped
A small handful of basil leaves finely shredded (about ¼ cup)
100gms baby spinach
250gms ravioli, cooked according to the pack instructions
Bring a large pot of salty water to the boil.
Heat a large skillet with a few tablespoons of olive oil and fry the onion until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the crushed garlic and cook for a further 30 seconds. Add a knob of butter and when its bubbling, add the chicken and fry until golden.
Add the flour and cook for about a minute or two then add the wine to deglaze the pan, scrapping any bits that got stuck on the pan. Add the stock in 2 parts and cook until the sauce has thickened (about 3 minutes).
Add the cream, Dijon mustard and chopped tomato and season with salt and a generous few grinds of black pepper. Allow the sauce to cook for a minute or two then add the chopped basil. Once that’s in, add the spinach and stir through to wilt.
Start cooking your ravioli by dropping each piece individually in the boiling water to ensure the pasta stays separated. It will take about 3 minutes to cook if it is fresh. I highly recommend timing the cooking of the pasta once the sauce has been made so that it can be added directly to the pan once it has been drained. Its ok if a little of the pasta water carries into the pan.
When it comes to creamy sauces, go for a medium- to full-bodied white wine. You need a wine with some flavour but also bright acidity and a lightly wooded Chenin Blanc fits the bill with this particular dish.
There was a time when knocking the mantra that lower yields result in better quality was all the rage in wine science circles. With most crops, yield is everything. The more you can grow, the better you are doing. With wine, it’s quite different. First of all, people try to avoid fertile soils for winegrowing, instead wanting the vines to struggle a bit (but not too much) so that rather than focus on growing lush canopies, they should put their energy into growing grapes. And firmly established in most appellation laws in the classic European wine regions is the notion that higher yields result in grapes that make less interesting wine. So typically the rules will specify a maximum yield for each appellation expressed in hectolitres per hectare. And in any one region where there is a hierarchy of appellations, the increasing quality comes with a reduced maximum yield. Those from non-European regions might well be sceptical of this idea that there is some causation, or even a tight correlation between lowered yield and better quality, especially when you have a situation like that found in Champagne where there’s a maximum yield, but growers produce more in many years and then are allowed to use this excess for creating stocks of reserve wines. If growing higher yields significantly reduced quality, then why would growers target over the legal yield? Would they really want to compromise quality like this? So clearly in some regions a maximum yield is imposed in order to game the market and keep demand high. But this doesn’t mean that all yield restrictions are bad.
As a result, the notion that there’s a tight correlation between yield and quality has been questioned. One popular idea was that bigger canopies allow the ripening of larger crops, and so opting for split canopy systems with much higher photosynthetic capacity would allow the vine to carry bigger crops and still achieve high quality.
In his book, Terroir and other myths of Winegrowing, Professor Mark Matthews had this yield/quality idea in his cross hairs. One of the ‘myths’ he highlights is what he calls HYLQ (‘high yield low quality’). He takes a thorough look, and explores the ancient history of this concept, as well as examining what wine writers and critics have said about yield. But when it comes to the science, the literature has a whole bunch of studies that aren’t really going to be able to answer the question for fine or interesting wine because of the vineyards they were done on, or the read-out of the experiments. He’s put together a convincing argument from what’s available in the scientific literature, but he might have spent his time better visiting vineyards around the world where winegrowers are making really interesting wines, and they know that if they don’t restrict yield, their wines will be less interesting. Matthews must assume they are daft enough to cling to old traditions even though it will be costing them a lot of money. I’ve met many of them, and they aren’t daft, and they aren’t afraid to question tradition. But where Matthews is correct is in pointing out that there is no simple relationship between yield and quality: this is surely a nuanced subject.
So let’s have a look at the science of yields and quality. One issue that needs to be addressed straight away is how are we measuring yield? Is it tonnes of grapes per acre/hectare? Or yield per vine? Then planting density is important. And there are no universals here: a lot will depend on the region.
If you are doing experiments in California’s hot, irrigated Central Valley, with dust-mulched vineyards, normally farming with heroic yields, then there’s a good chance you could drop yields and see no increase in quality. Same grows for the hot bulk wine regions in Australia, or the lower quality terroirs in Bordeaux. Do what you like in a horrible vineyard set up for bulk wine production and you won’t see much in the way of a quality up-tick with lower yields.
Let’s consider yield per acre/hectare. Lower yield clearly doesn’t always result in better quality. You might have missing vines and high disease pressure, and have lost yield because of poor viticulture. This isn’t going to increase quality.
And a lot depends on the starting point. You might have a very well balanced old-vine vineyard giving good yields. In this case, there may be no point in dropping crop. If you do, you might bring harvest forward, and in warm climates, this may be problematic because the grapes are ripening in summer conditions rather than autumnal ones. This might be a negative. Lower yields might result in riper fruit, and in some cases over-ripeness.
In other settings, you might be looking at a bumper harvest, but one that the vines won’t be able to ripen before the growing season runs out of oomph. Sometimes, dropping crop is the only way to get the remaining grapes ripe enough. I remember spending time in Marlborough and hearing stories that with harvest not too far off, many of the vines were carrying crop loads as high as 35-40 tonnes per hectare. Marlborough gets good yields of Sauvignon – the average is around 16 tonnes/hectare, and some Dillons Point vineyards can give 20 tonnes/hectare at top quality – but the vines simply wouldn’t be able to ripen 35 tonnes/hectare and so growers were running machine harvesters down rows to do some crop thinning.
One piece of evidence in favour of the lower yields raising quality argument is that people do drop crop in many regions around the world. If there was no quality gain to be had, then this would be counter-productive, because it costs money to reduce yields. Either people are doing it for a reason, or they are stupid. People who are stupid like this usually go out of business. People would laugh at scientists suggesting there isn’t a relationship, because they have often experienced what happens with higher yields, and for top quality wine it just doesn’t work. They know that there’s a limit to what their vineyards can produce before the quality starts going down. But these are often vineyards with potential for top quality. Some sites can’t reach top quality irrespective of yield.
Nature sometimes intervenes and does its own experiments on yield and quality for the growers. I’ve tasted Pinot Noirs from New Zealand and California where the crop has been reduced far below the winegrowers choice through frost or hail events. The surviving grapes end up making small quantities of concentrated, intense wine. Sometimes the structure and intensity is a little too much, but these naturally low yielding vintages can be very instructive.
And then we have old vineyards, where often there is a reduction in yield. Is this part of the benefit of old vines? It’s difficult to say: sometimes the yield is reduced because there are missing vines, or there’s some sort of disease. Perhaps the advantage of old vines is that they have a natural balance. Given good farming and wise pruning, there’s no reason why old vines should have considerably lower yields than young ones, and I suspect that you could get great quality with reasonable yields from a healthy, well-farmed old vineyard.
This is clearly not a simple topic. Growers should be cautious in assuming that lowering yield is going to give them better quality. It all depends what you mean by quality. It also depends on the vineyard region, the site, the existing yield, the health of the vines and the stage that yield reduction is practised, as well as the vintage conditions (which you won’t know in advance). The best thing is to read the vintage, and do some trials, and see what works.
It’s all very well drinking the stuff and knowing the grapes its made from and suchlike, but we could also do with a perspective of the larger picture of the greater endeavour – the industry – each bottle is part of. A rather gloomy picture, on the whole. So, time for some more statistics, following on my look a few weeks back at the connection between value and packaging. Back to the latest Sawis booklet of statistics, supplemented, for an international perspective, by the World Vine and Wine Sector in 2023 report from the OIV, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine.
The OIV gives the figures behind the international situation of adversity (and its reflection in South African wine) sketched last week by Michael Fridjhon. Global wine consumption in 2023 is estimated to have dropped by 2.6% compared to 2022’s already low figures. Higher prices for wine, driven by inflationary pressure on production and consumption costs, are easy to blame. The volume of wine exported around the world fell – while the price per litre of exported wine was at a record high. That improvement in prices was true for South Africa – but the drop in exports has been pretty serious, over 20%. It does help to explain why it’s rather easier this year to find more normally very rare wines sitting on local wine shelves, though I don’t think prices have been pushed down (quite the reverse in the case of some of the most successful and prestigious producers).
Arguably fortunately for the world’s producers, I suppose, international production was down again, by 10%. Not since 1961 has so little wine been made around the world. Weird climatic extremes were largely to blame, together with fungal diseases. Those diseases were certainly responsible in South Africa for a 10% decline in production. Incidentally, Australia fared even worse, with a decline of some 26% – total production there was not all that much higher than here; though Australia’s exports were a touch healthier (though also down on 2022).
South Africa’s decline in wine-vineyard area continued in 2023 – emphatically below 90 000 hectares, down from just under 100 000 ten years ago. The Sawis booklet goes into plenty of detail about plantings and uprootings. Very noticeably, it is the hot, dry irrigated Northern Cape that has had by far the largest reduction – I’d guess because the prices for their fruit were most marginal, and because it might well be easier in that region to profitably change crop (let’s hope so; we’re not likely to miss the wine particularly). Vineyard area there is down by nearly a half in the past decade, and the Sawis tables show that the Northern Cape was the only area to not plant a single vine last year, while it uprooted 519 ha in just the one year. Robertson, a very much much larger area, uprooted 670 ha but also planted 343 ha.
I mentioned a few weeks ago the interesting evolution of packaging in South Africa (notably the decline in the sale of glass bottles and the increase in bag-in-box and tetrapack). Which leaves the question of what’s in those packages.
Interestingly to me, for still wines, red and white are pretty equal in 2023: both just over 155 milion litres, with rosé about a third of that number, at 55 million. Firstly, those sold under varietal names. For whites, sauvignon blanc is way, way ahead (15.3 million litres), followed by chenin (just under 7 m, and chardonnay not far behind at 4.8 m litres. Named blends at 3.7 m litres.
The named reds are much closer – and the blends here are by far the biggest category at 14.6 m litres. Merlot is at 7 m, followed by cab, then pinotage, then shiraz at 4.6 m litres.
Nameless mash-ups are bigger in both cases. “Other white” and “dry white” total nearly 24 m litres. “Other red” and “dry red” total 67 m litres. But it is the sweet versions which overwhelm the drinking stats. 100 million litres of natural sweet and semi-sweet whites – two thirds of the total white wines. A bit more than half that for reds (56 m). And 48 m litres of sweet rosé – more than 90% of the rosés made.
Sparkling wine of all colours is under 9 m litres, with cap classiques about half of that. Fortified is a serious category at 26.3 m litres, but at the opposite end of the alcohol scale, low-alc and no-alc wines are still essentially irrelevant to the wine-drinking statistics. Fortunately, perhaps, as those stats are depressing enough already.
During the second half of the 20th century, Viognier plantings were confined to the northern Rhône appellation of Condrieu and became so limited that the variety was in danger of extinction. It offers both perfume and body, however, and these hedonistic pleasures were seized upon and so it came to be planted throughout the world of wine – there were 639ha of it in South Africa at the end of 2023, making it the 18th most planted variety.
Viognier is often difficult to drink precisely because of its extravagant aromatics and typically big palate weight but Chris Williams makes one of the more balanced local versions. His Foundry 2022 from Stellenbosch was fermented and matured for nine months in neutral barrels.
On the nose, peach, floral perfume and a subtle herbal note while the palate shows concentrated fruit, zippy acidity and a dry finish. Full but balanced, this has a winning sweetness about it, a residual sugar of 3.7g/l adding nice weight. Alcohol, meanwhile, is 13.43%, total acidity is 6.1g/l and pH 3.53. Price: R250 a bottle.
CE’s rating: 92/100.
Check out our South African wine ratings database.
Here are our nine most highly rated wines of last month:
Anysbos Disdit 2023 – 98 (read original review here)
Savage Girl Next Door Syrah 2023 – 98 (read original review here)
Trizanne Signature Wines Reserve Semillon Sauvignon Blanc 2017 – 98 (read original review here)
Trizanne Signature Wines Sondagskloof White 2023 – 97 (read original review here)
Morgenster The Reserve White 2023 – 96 (read original review here)
Savage Follow the Line – 96 (read original review here)
Storm Ridge Chardonnay 2023 – 96 (read original review here)
Trizanne Signature Wines Elim Syrah 2023 – 96 (read original review here)
Trizanne Signature Wines Hemel-En-Aarde Ridge Barbera 2023 – 96 (read original review here)
Johan Heyns, founder of Bot River undertaking Anysbos along with wife Sue, may be 75 years old but he isn’t slowing down. Plantings of vines are now 21ha, Sauvignon Blanc set to be grafted over to Chenin Blanc and Picpoul. Marelise Niemann, of Momento renown, makes the wine, these ever more accomplished. Tasting notes and ratings for the new releases as follows:
Disdit 2023
Price: R390
57% Chenin Blanc 17% Grenache Blanc, 27% Marsanne and 9% Roussanne. Matured for 10 months in neutral oak. Exquisite aromatics of potpourri, hay and herbs before citrus and peach while a touch of reduction adds interest. The palate is extraordinarily vivid – sappy on entry but the finish is dry and lightly grippy. An remarkably well-defined, harmonious wine. Alc: 13.34%.
CE’s rating: 98/100.
Tesame 2022
Price: R390
55% Grenache, 33% Syrah and 12% Cinsault. Partial whole-bunch fermentation before maturation lasting 16 months in neutral oak. Pretty aromatics of red berries, flowers, herbs and white pepper. Pure and juicy on the palate – not super-concentrated but well balanced and intricate. Bright acidity and powdery tannins. Grapes picked earlier in response to a warm, dry growing season, the alcohol a restrained 12.6%.
CE’s rating: 93/100.
Stokalleen Syrah 2022
Price: R390
NEW. Grapes from unirrigated bushvines on rocky shale soils. Partial whole-bunch fermentation. Red and black berries, hints of fynbos and leafiness, earth and pepper on the nose while the palate is rich with moderate acidity and powdery tannins. Luscious on entry, the finish gently savoury and the depth that Bot River Syrah typically shows (Gabriëlskloof, Luddite) tempered to some degree. Alc: 13.97%.
CE’s rating: 92/100.
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