Jolandie Fouché of Wolf & Woman has added two single-vineyard wines to her portfolio. The first is a Chenin Blanc called Always Present Often Invisible, from Olifants River district – her grandparents used to farm near Vanrhynsdorp and her childhood involved many a visit to see the spring wildflowers in that part of the world (hence the label); the second is a Syrah from a 0.5ha vineyard on a wheat farm near Darling that so enchanted her on visiting it that she couldn’t resist making a wine from it. Tasting notes and ratings as follows:
Grenache Blanc 2023
Price: R280
A 50:50 blend of Piekenierskloof and Voor-Paardeberg grapes. Matured for eight months in older 500-litre barrels. Expressive aromatics of pear, peach, herbs, a hint of pineapple and a touch of reduction while the palate is robust with dense fruit, bright acidity and savoury wine. Alc: 13.2%.
CE’s rating: 95/100.
Chenin Blanc 2023
Price: R320
Grapes from four Swartland vineyards, planting dates ranging from 1968 to 1981. 70% from Paardeberg vineyards on granite, 30% from vineyards north-west of Malmesbury on iron-rich clay soils. Matured for 10 months in older 300- and 500-litre barrels. Pear, white peach, soft citrus, some yeasty complexity and a hint of reduction on the nose. Great fruit concentration, driving acidity and a pithy finish. A wine of both presence and poise. Alc: 13.3%.
CE’s rating: 96/100.
Always Present Often Invisible Chenin Blanc 2023
Price: R420
NEW. Grapes from Vredendal on sandy red soils. Pear, white peach, lime and potpourri. Light bodied with racy acidity and a slightly bitter finish. Elegant, understated and hugely appealing. Total production was a single barrel, equivalent to 560 bottles. Alc: 12.5%.
CE’s rating: 93/100.
Pinotage 2023
Price: R295
90% of grapes from a Paardeberg vineyard planted in 1973, 10% from a vineyard planted in 2006. 15% whole-bunch fermented. Matured for eight months in older barrels, two months in concrete tank. Red cherry, orange, potpourri, earth and spice on the nose while there is an intriguing interplay between sweet fruit and grippy tannins on the palate – rustic in the best sense. Alc: 12.8%.
CE’s rating: 93/100.
Syrah 2023
Price: R375
90% of grapes from north-west of Malmesbury on iron-rich clay soils, 10% from Kasteelberg on schist. 100% whole-bunch fermented. Red berries, lilies, fynbos, cured meat, white pepper and earth on the nose. The palate is medium bodied and nicely balanced – good fruit expression, fresh acidity and powdery tannins, the finish gently savoury. Alc: 13.4%.
CE’s rating: 94/100.
Glen Frank Syrah 2023
Price: R420
NEW. Grapes from a Darling vineyard, planted in 2008, south-facing and located 9km from the ocean on granite. Black berries, flowers, fynbos and some flinty reduction on the nose. The palate is light and lean with fresh acidity and fine-grained tannins. Pure and clean with a super-dry finish. Alc: 13.3%.
CE’s rating: 93/100.
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Few local wines are as revered as the Cape Bordeaux red blend that is Paul Sauer from Stellenbosch property Kanonkop and 2021 is increasingly considered in the same bracket of quality as 2015 and 2017, so the PS from this vintage (price: R995 a bottle) is surely a must-by?
A blend of 70% Cabernet Sauvignon, 17% Merlot and 13% Cabernet Franc, maturation lasted 24 months in 225-litre barrels, 100% new. The nose is currently very primary with notes of red and black berries, rose, tea leaf, vanilla and baking spice plus a little rubbery reduction. The palate is medium bodied with fresh acidity and fine tannins, the wood integration extraordinarily successful. With a moderate alcohol of 13.49%, it’s no doubt an elegant rendition of this wine, so much so that I wonder if it’s not a bit underdone.
CE’s rating: 93/100.
Lest anybody think I’m being contrarian for the sake of it, the Cabernet Sauvignon 2019 was also poured at the release tasting. Beautiful aromatics of cranberry, cassis, some floral perfume, leafiness and subtle notes of vanilla, spice and pencil shavings. The palate has great fruit expression to go with plenty of verve, the finish long and dry. It’s poised, precise and very sophisticated – I rated it 96 on release in July last year and it’s just getting better and better. Price: R595 a bottle.
Check out our South African wine ratings database.
Husband and wife Albert and Anmar van Niekerk are something of a dream team, he involved at a high level in the production of both Crystallum and Thorne & Daughters, she the Gabriëlskloof winemaker. Van Niekerk Vintners is their own label, tasting notes and ratings for the latest releases as follows:
Sonwater 2023
Price: R285
90% Swartland Chenin Blanc and 10% Clairette from Worcester. Matured for 10 months in older oak. The nose shows flinty reduction, peach, soft citrus, and hay while the palate is taut but equally not without weight. Dense fruit and snappy acidity, the finish wonderfully salty-savoury. As ever, the dash of Clairette works harder than you might expect to make this wine distinctive. Alc: 13.5%.
CE’s rating: 95/100.
Goue Rif 2023
Price: R285
From Overberg Chardonnay. Battonage once a week for about two months immediately after fermentation was completed (no lees stirring on the Crystallum wines). Lemon and orange but also notes of freshly baked bread, spice and some leesy complexity on the nose. The palate is old school being rich and round, smooth textured, the acidity well integrated, the finish gently savoury.
FedEx Next Generation Awards rating: 90/100.
Rebellie 2022
Price: R285
From Bot River Grenache. 40% whole-bunch fermentation before maturation lasting 10 months in older oak. Red cherry, cranberry and raspberry plus subtle notes of orange, fynbos, musk and earth on the nose. The palate is not too fragile but still remarkably poised – good fruit expression, fresh acidity and powdery tannins. Pleasing structure delivered at the modest alcohol of 13%.
CE’s rating: 94/100.
Check out our South African wine ratings database.
Shiraz is a relative latecomer to the South African wine scene. As recently as the 1980s, total plantings were less than 1,000 hectares. Most of those vineyards were severely virused. Wine appreciation students at the time were taught that “leathery” and “sweaty” were the key identifiers of the variety – though it turns out that this was more an indication of the impact of leaf-roll than the fruit quality of the cultivar.
Unsurprisingly, growers weren’t beating a path to the nurseries to increase their shiraz vineyards. It was only with the post-1994 export boom (and its demand for “international” red varieties) coupled with growing worldwide interest in shiraz/syrah that plantings took off. By 2010 there were over 10,000 hectares of mainly young vineyards widely distributed throughout the Cape.
Many of the producers had never worked with it before: the results were not pretty. At the 2007 Trophy Wine Show there were around 160 shiraz entries. A significant percentage of the wines submitted were faulty. High pHs meant that brettanomyces infections were rampant. In an attempt to emulate the success of the Southeastern Australian styles, producers made wines which were over-extracted and over-oaked.
A correction naturally followed. Slow sales meant that many growers favoured other varieties, while consumers – for reasons which still elude me – made merlot their cultivar of choice. For the past decade there’s very little money available for new plantings, so there’s a discrepancy between the vineyard area given over to shiraz, and the demand for the fruit. While shiraz still represents 10% of our total plantings, the more popular merlot sits at about 6%.
I’m guessing that one of the reasons our merlots are often so ordinary while the shirazes are getting ever better is the impact of this differential in the market. We have 60% more shiraz planted than merlot, but we sell almost 50% more merlot (as certified wine) than we do shiraz. In short – it’s harder to find a market for the shiraz. For growers battling to sell fruit in tough conditions a greater effort has to be made to produce a premium crop.
All this goes some way towards explaining the remarkably competitive price of the trophy-winning Nederburg The Winemasters Shiraz 2022 at this year’s Trophy Wine Show. Clearly there’s great shiraz fruit to be bought for not very much money. This is not to detract in any way from the achievement of the Nederburg winemaking team in putting together a substantial volume of clearly very decent wine at a price point which frankly ought to be as much an embarrassment as it is an achievement.
Unsurprisingly, there has been considerable comment about how a wine which sells for around R100 per bottle could possibly be good enough for any trophy, let alone the clutch of gongs it has collected along the way – Best Shiraz, Best Red of Show and Best Value Gold Medallist. There are obviously commentators who feel the judges must have erred, or that the awards are an unrepeatable fluke.
Before dismissing this result out of hand, it’s worth reflecting briefly on how many hoops the wine had to pass through to win its “Best Red Wine of Show” trophy. The primary tasting panel (comprising one international MW and two local judges) awarded it a gold medal. As show chairman I reviewed that decision. It then went forward with the other gold medallists in that class to the trophy judging – at which all the local and international judges have an equal vote. At that stage it secured the best-in-class trophy (the other gold winner being Cederberg 2020). Those judges also allocate a final score to every wine. By aggregating those scores the show’s auditor is able to determine which is the highest scoring red wine overall. If the primary panel had erred, its run would have ended then. Instead it went on to collect several more trophies.
It’s always possible to find something to mock about a show result: the universe of wine commentators knows exactly what it thinks. When a competition publishes its laureates, whatever does not fit in with the popularly held views gets held up to ridicule. It would be more useful to accept that the winemaking team at Nederburg produced a pretty smart wine at a price we have come to regard as too low to be financially viable. It’s clearly a really good red wine. And the price is the price. So the disconnect between the two is where this discussion can be most fruitful.
We all know there’s no connection between what it costs to produce a premium wine and the price at which it sells. Jancis Robinson has shown that there is very little input cost differential between a Fifth Growth from the Medoc and a First Growth (providing you exclude the cost of the land). Farming costs per hectare are similar; so is the cost of making the wine. Only the percentage of new wood has any real impact on the final per litre cost. Yet the First Growth is released at more than ten times the price of the Fifth and probably three times the price of a Supersecond. Reputation, coupled with carefully managed supply-and-demand, is what drives the premium.
If reputation is properly curated, you can almost bypass the impact of supply: Lafite Rothschild is the largest of the Medoc classed growths, and also consistently the most expensive. Dom Perignon is the best known and most lucrative of Champagne’s prestige cuvées, yet the annual production volume is at least 5m bottles. Clearly price does not have to follow the Burgundy model of impossibly low volumes with buyers driven to pay increasingly ridiculous amounts for fear of missing out.
But selling prices also have to be sustainable. Can we be certain, at current fruit prices, that a wine as good as the Nederburg Shiraz can be made next year and every year into the future? The industry, and the pundits with prescriptions for its ongoing success, talk constantly about scaleability – the capacity of the Cape to make high-end wine in volumes which would give South Africa a presence in international markets. Nederburg made about 400,000 litres of the 2022 Shiraz: will the vineyards be there ten years from now if the growers who produced the fruit for this wine earned so little for their trouble that the on-shelf price came in at under R100? That’s the thing about wine – you can’t really make it if you don’t have the grapes.
Bruyère is the own label of two winemaking brothers, who prefer to remain anonymous, the project a way of remembering their mother who died in 2020.
Legkaart Riesling 2022
Price: R250
Grapes from Elgin, fermented and matured for 10 months in mainly older oak barrels but some stainless steel to retain freshness. The nose shows lime, grapefruit, green apple and spice while the palate is substantial but equally poised – there’s a wonderful interplay between fruit weight and punchy acidity while the finish is long and dry. Alc: 13.49%.
CE’s rating: 93/100.
Aandster Syrah 2022
Price: R250
Grapes from Swartland, winemaking involving 100% whole-bunch fermentation before maturation lasting 12 months in older 225-litre barrels. Enticing aromatics of red berries, cured meat and white pepper along with hints of potpourri, fynbos and olive tapenade. The palate is medium-bodied with fresh acidity and powdery, densely packed tannins. A remarkably balanced and elegant example of the variety. Alc: 13.43%.
CE’s rating: 94/100.
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The FedEx Next Generation Awards, which set out to identify the best winemakers under the age of 35, are hardly an original idea. The 30 Under 30 as run by business magazine Forbes dates from 2011. Charge card company Diners Club has underwritten the Young Winemaker of the Year Award as an adjunct to its Winemaker of the Year Award since 2001. Industry magazine WineLand started its own 30 under 30 in 2020.
How much should South African fine wine be engaging with the issue of succession? Some might argue that there’s nothing to worry about. The sector is not hindered by a lack of know-how. Advancement of technologies, or even positive retreat from such, are being well applied – drones in the vineyard, clay amphora in the cellar. There’s also still plenty of investment from both local and international stakeholders. Wine quality seems to go up and up.
Let’s, however, acknowledge that there is a massive disconnect between commodity and fine wine. More than three quarters of wine sells for under R50 per litre and roughly two-thirds in packaging other than glass. Of the over 9,000 wines on the market, 5% account for 80% of sales.
So how robust is the industry really? Unfortunately, it seems quite happy to remain deliberately dumbed down so as to appeal to the largest possible number of people – in 1994, Chenin Blanc and Colombar were the top two varities when it came to production and in 2024, Chenin Blanc and Colombar are still the top two varieties. Another way of looking at things is that the industry’s largest corporate player, namely Heineken seems to have largely ceded the top-end of the market.
It must be said, however, that SA fine wine has had a good run over the last three decades, a small sliver of the overall industry thought it may be. Better product results from competition, experimentation and free-thinking and our top 20 or 30 producers have succeeded fabulously, which has led to a rise in standards at the next level of the market, as those just behind them have emulated.
Market dynamics were in also in favour of SA fine wine, the UK and European trade and media enamoured with the collective offering for a long while. The incoming intel, however, is that there are now shifts among opinion-makers towards other countries of the day. If change within the industry isn’t afoot, then it ought to be.
Transformation is happening. Many of our top producers now prefer not to own land, thereby avoiding high upfront investment and ongoing maintenance expenses. Equally, there have been too many links in the supply chain for way too long, and it was remarkable to witness how many wineries adopted digital technologies to facilitate direct-to-consumer sales when Covid-19 disrupted business as usual.
Stagnation and decline are also happening. The number of primary grape growers has dropped from 4,786 in 1991 to 2,487 in 2022. In 2024, the total area under vineyard amounted to 87,848ha, down from an all-time high of 101,259ha in 2009. As alluded to above, complacency, lack of innovation, and resistance to change seem to be baked into some quarters of the industry.
This brings us, rather neatly, back to the topic of succession. The role of a particular generation which was dubbed variously as the “New Wave” or “Young Guns” is well-documented. The likes of Adi Badenhorst, Marc Kent and Eben Sadie were instrumental in revitalising the industry, but this cohort is now emphatically middle-aged.
Will we see their like again? To some extent, it seems unlikely that the wine industry will ever be as fluid, infused with optimism, and full of opportunity as it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the New Wave first came to prominence. However, I believe it is beholden on the industry to take responsibility for its future by deliberately providing space for emerging talent. These new entrants bring progressive ideas and a renewed sense of ambition. Incumbents, in turn, are compelled to raise their game. It might be argued that this process happens naturally, but the industry seems too fraught with challenges to take such a hand-off approach. The FedEx Next Generation Awards is an effort to find tomorrow’s heroes today.
In my modest way, I do have a response to one of the wine industry’s big problems – a very simple solution that would also solve an irritation in my personal wine life. I’ll return to that idea, and you’ll see why, unfortunately, it just ain’t going to be realised.
The big problem is intimately connected (though not necessarily, in my opinion), with wine’s great glory: its infinite variety. This glory is of course a great nuisance to retailers, especially supermarkets. With washing powder, biscuits, yoghurt, beer and fizzy drinks they’re obliged to stock only a comparatively small number of brands and types to give us customers the feeling (sometimes the illusion) of choice. But with wine they have to devote an unreasonable amount of shelfspace and deal with a large number of producers and distributors. The big wine brands mollify them, but not enough. The supermarkets, a frightening power in modern life, must be itching at that complexity.
The problem I alluded to to is this: leaving aside the large volume of the stuff in boxes, much of wine’s multifariousness comes in a correspondingly wide range of glass bottles, resulting in a carbon footprint that the poor old world can ill afford. An article about bottle re-use last December in Wine Business Monthly quoted the California Wine Institute to the effect that “glass bottles account for approximately 29% of a winery’s carbon footprint”; and then cited another study, by an organisation dedicated to mitigating climate change, putting the total “closer to 50%-70%, when including the energy needed to melt glass and transportation outputs”.
That’s glass for you. I mention the variety of bottles (shapes, weights, sizes) as significant because that must seriously affect the potential for re-use, by complicating it immensely. I remember that 30 years ago I used to take my empty wine-bottles to a little kiosk behind the Drop-Inn in Claremont and they would give me five cents or whatever credit for each bottle – each standard bottle, that is; foreign or otherwise unusual bottles they wouldn’t accept, and those had to go to be crushed for recycling (which is vastly inferior in environment-friendly terms than re-use). No longer. It’s not only a question that the world has moved implacable to waste all resources and whenever possible turn to single-use plastic (another step that wine has fortunately resisted); I’m sure that an increased variety of available bottles, locally produced and imported, makes collection and re-use ever more impractical.
I don’t know where I would take even “standard” bottles for re-use now, though there must be a way, as there is clearly still a tiny amount of wine-bottle re-use happening in South Africa (I had a sub-garagiste friend that used them). And it happens with beer bottles. In fact I’m assured (in an admittedly 2018 article online) that “South Africa has one of the most efficient returnable bottle systems in the world” – certainly nothing to do with wine. Coincidentally, while I’ve been pondering all this recently, a friend took me on a tour offered by the historic Newlands Brewery in Cape Town. Comparatively little of my interest was in the fairly mundane process of industrial-scale beer production – though I did get to taste a tiny amount of hops, against the tour-giver’s advice, and it was probably the most persistent, and pretty horribly bitter, flavour I’ve every experienced.
The process of packaging big-brand beer, in bottle and can, is extraordinary, however. Millions of bottles move around on kilometres of automated tracks from one station to another (with scarcely a human worker in sight). And a lot of the process, prior to the bottling and sealing of the beer, involves sorting and cleaning and multiply-checking, by various high-tech means, previously used bottles. Apparently they can be cleaned, refilled and relabelled some 35 times. Huge truckloads of empties arrive in Newlands, huge truckloads of filled bottles depart, many times a day.
It’s a scenario that is not transferable to wine on a large scale. Wine is small stuff. I have a feeling that Distell did some bottle re-use for one of their bigger brands – perhaps Heineken still does: Heineken SA announced earlier this year that it was working towards 65% returnable glass for its beer portfolio in 2024. I must find out if they’re doing anything remotely as ambitious with wine, but I seriously doubt it.
All those different bottles that the infinite variety of wine revels in is, I presume, an insurmountable problem, even if retailers could be persuaded – or obliged – to take and sort returned empties. And observing the appalling lack of returnability of Coke etc plastic bottles, rational, environment-friendly legislation seems unlikely. Perhaps we could invoke help from those impoverished “scavengers” on our streets that allow returned aluminium cans to be such a South African success story.
Recycling glass, an expensive, fuel-costly business, is far from being the best answer to wine’s big problem with its bottles. Re-use is vital, and if we could only indulge in a bit of unfashionable command-economics, I have the answer. We must abandon all the variety in bottles, all those different versions (including the apallingly overweight ones) of the basic designs. There is one great bottle design suitable for all non-sparkling wine – what we call “the Bordeaux bottle” in its simplest form: no taper, no extra weight or height, no big punt. Anyone who has ever tried to stack wine bottles (or to fit them in most wine-fridge drawers) will know of the problems encountered with extra-heavy or extra-long bottles, with ghastly skittle-shapes, with traditional Burgundy bottles, worst of all with Germanic flutes….
So, a lightish-weight Bordeaux bottle. We could allow a few concessions, for example for screw-cap or cork versions, as well as different formats. Marketers could play with labels and capsules as much as they wish. I could stack the bottles efficiently, empty them happily, and take them to be reused 35 times. Is that sensible, or what? Meanwhile I’d settle for a genuine attempt to re-use the present excessive variety.
Vusi Dalicuba of Vergenoegd Löw .
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Franschhoek cellar Le Lude is a specialist Cap Classique producer founded by Nic and Ferda Barrow, first bottling being 2012. Bubbly obsessive Paul Gerber was initially winemaker (before leaving for Colmant in 2019) and it was therefore he that put the newly released Madáme 2015 into a bottle.
Consisting of 95% Chardonnay and 5% Pinot Noir, 40% sourced from Franschhoek, 40% from Roberston and 20% from Bonnievale, a small component was fermented in older barrels and left on the lees for nine months.
Complex aromatics of citrus, flinty reduction, freshly baked bread and sea-breeze precede a palate that is lean with bracing acidity and a super-dry finish (alc: 12%). It’s remarkably precise being taut and intensely flavoured at the same time. Price: R790 a bottle.
CE’s rating: 96/100.
Check out our South African wine ratings database.
De Wet Viljoen.
Bot River property has announced De Wet Viljoen as its new winemaker. Viljoen obtained B.Sc. in Microbiology at Stellenbosch University before specialising in Oenology and Viticulture completing his studies in 2000. He started at Neethlingshof in 2003 and worked there for over 20 years.
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