Tim James: The wow factor of Lukas van Loggerenberg’s wines

I’ve often wondered what it is that makes a really, really good crafter of fine wines. It has become clear to me over all these years of drinking the stuff and considering it that there are undoubtedly some makers who stand out (unfortunately I’ve also known one or two who seem downright inept), quite apart from access to fine vineyards, and going further than intelligence, technical competence, a willingness to work hard, an extreme attention to detail, wide experience and a trained and sensitive palate.

I’ve come to think that there is an unaccountable something involved, like having a pair of magic hands for the job. I think of winemaking as more a craft than an art (without implying any less respect: it’s just a different set of criteria), but – why not? – within any craft, where hard work and training can accomplish more than it can in art, there can be found people peculiarly attuned as if by instinct to their métier. Amidst a plethora of excellent local winemakers, I have often thought I would nominate Chris Alheit as the most instinctively … magical.

And it was Chris who originally pointed me in the direction of someone else whom I, from the start of our acquaintance, have thought of as having a good slug of that rare and profound instinct. Early in 2016, in a PS to an email, Chris mentioned a name I’d never heard: “You should visit Lukas van Loggerenberg. He’s got something cool happening in a shed on a hill in Stellenbosch.” So of course I took the hint and made haste to visit that Devon Valley shed. Lukas led me through the barrels of his maiden vintage, and told me how he had taken the scary leap (with, as it were, the brave cry of “Geronimo!” recorded on the label of his cinsault) into having his own brand. As I wrote in my Grape report on that visit: “Friends helped push: Chris Alheit said ‘Just do it!’, and Lukas ‘actually made the final decision during a holiday with Reenen Borman [of Boschkloof] whilst sitting in the vineyards drinking some champagne’.”

I concluded that piece with the observation that “The Stellenbosch hills and mountains and valleys do not as yet harbour too many outposts of the Cape avant-garde, and this one is more than welcome. Look forward, as I do, to these wines being bottled.”

Six months later they were indeed bottled, and I did a formal tasting of the four maiden Van Loggerenberg wines, together with those of his great friend Reenen Borman, in the Borman’s Boschkloof cellar. As I wrote at the time (under the only title I’ve ever written including the word “Wow!”): “These are two of the finest examples of the youngest generation of remarkable winemakers that the Cape wine revolution is resolutely turning out.” And after the tasting I commented about Lukas, thinking back to the Alheit debut, that “not in the four or five years since then have I been so convinced of the brilliance of a major new star in our starry skies”.

Forgive all the quotes from myself – but I was smugly pleased, on rereading my blogs, to be reminded just how keen I’d been from the start. And at a tasting in Cape Town last week of the latest Van Loggerenberg releases I had not the least temptation to temper any of my enthusiasm, or adjust my opinion of his having “a touch and an instinct that is magical”. The seven 2024s we were given were made in the Paarl cellar that Lukas has occupied for some years now, making his own wines and a few for other labels. I won’t go beyond some general remarks, as Christian Eedes reviewed the wines earlier this month, with details, and I very largely agree with his ratings (though possibly preferring the Kameraderie, while agreeing that both chenins are first-rate).

There are now two cinsaults – the original Geronimo but now all from a Stellenbosch vineyard, and Lötter, made from the 1932 Franschhoek vineyard that Lukas expensively snapped up when Leeu Passant for some reason gave it it up (just 220 bottles of it this year because of insect damage, so you won’t easily find it). Both are comparatively rare examples of the grape that justify its claims to occasional monovarietal greatness when farmed and vinifed to that end. They’re both perfumed, but not vulgarly so, intense and elegant, with some darkness in their youthful brightness, and with deeply serious tannic structures promising future development. Somewhat different aromatic/flavour characters – Lukas pointed especially to the blackcurrant element in Lötter, which has an extra degree of refinement, tannic density, and severe elegance accompanying the inevitable charm. If I could keep it another ten years, I’d hunt it down.

Breton, the two-vineyard Stellenbosch cab franc that helped many South Africans realise that there is a viable, somewhat lighter and less grand Loire model for the grape alongside the new-oaked, ripe Bordeaux one, seemed to me a little richer and more forceful than it sometimes has been – concentrated, dense and precise – but still with the bone-dry elegance, purity and finesse that is the Van Loggerenberg hallmark.

High Hopes is also a wine introduced to the top range since the maiden releases, a sweet-fruited, velvet-textured and succulent syrah, with a little grenache just twisting the aromatics and taming the palate to an earlier charm.

The first Graft, 2017, included cinsault, but the label quickly mutated to being one of the iterations of straight Polkadraai Hills syrah that helped advance that ward on its path to fame as a terroir (a pathway much cleared by Bruwer Raats, let it be said). A very fine wine, always amongst the top Cape syrahs – the 2024 no exception: pure, expressive, complex, a luxurious element supported by the new oak in its elevage but with a wild edge to it. Not at all a hipsterish version, but as usual coming in comfortably under 14% alcohol, which seems to me just right. Incidentally, the night of the tasting I opened a 2017 Graft – still youthful; fine and lovely to drink.

Great Cape chenins are not rare, happily, and Van Loggerenberg supplies two excellent examples, in the cleverly balanced Paardeberg-Stellenbosch-Piekenierskloof blend Trust Your Gut, and Kameraderie (one of the original line-up of 2016 but then from an old Paarl vineyard and now from Swartland). My favourite thing to find in Cape chenin is “stoniness” (I’d be unlikely to use the descriptor for a Loire version, however “mineral”) and I invoked it for both of these – together with some perfumed tropicality for the slightly phenolic, integrated Trust Your Gut), but more pervasively for the implacably structured and sternly-elegant, fine-textured Kameraderie.

All in all, I think I might relax my vocabulary again, as I did in December 2016, and finish by just saying “wow”. I think Lukas’s wine-making has grown in confidence, maturity and focus in the years since I first used the word, and his range has evolved, but the element of magic remains quintessential and winning.

• Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution appeared in 2013.