Most wine producers toe the line. Inherently a conservative pastime, winemaking doesn’t court many true mavericks, those willing to break away and challenge the status quo. It shows in the way certain concepts are repeated over and over, and universally: the vital presence of cooling sea breezes; the unique wonders of their terroir, or site, and the way they express its character; the wondrous combination of viognier with shiraz.
Carl van der Merwe of Quoin Rock believes all of these need interrogation, since the grip of convention is strangling our winemaking. Take the cooling breezes. Most Stellenbosch wineries will happily explain how these maritime breezes cool their vineyards, but Van der Merwe is sceptical. “Come February, you’re desperate to feel cool air on these hills. I think the cooling breezes stop at Vergelegen.” Or the viognier issue: “Put viognier in your shiraz if you want show results, but our Cape shiraz doesn’t need it, it has enough fruit already.”
But it’s the way he brushes the conventional wisdoms aside that give you the distinct impression that this is a man of conviction: without a hint of cheekiness. For the last two years he has been farming without pesticide sprays and without irrigation. The vineyards are colourful with wild flowers and a multitude of insects, and wild plants at the stems of the vines encourage earthworms to aerate the soils. He’s experimenting with high density plantings to get the vines to compete and send their roots deeper. This means they always find water, without irrigation.
The essential concept is not to replace any act that nature performs. It’s all part of the organic direction he’s headed in, though he’s not going to give it any labels. In the cellar, painstaking bunch selection, then natural yeasts do all the fermentation, and the wines settle by gravity in their own time.
All this may sound quite normal – expected almost – but modern winemaking practise is replete with short cuts and interventions to speed the process of growing a vine and getting the grape into the bottle. And conventional practise can make good wine. It can even make very good wine. But for Van der Merwe, it is not making unique and individualistic wine, but rather a formulaic version of such, one that can be tweaked to get the expected result almost every time.
In days gone by, Quoin Rock’s wines would have been the less expensive ones, but in today’s world of standardisation they are the dearer ones. Sauvignon Blanc at R62, Chardonnay at R75, Syrah at R100. But as far as I can tell, they are genuine wines, as genuine as they come.
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