Standing on the terrace of the new De Grendel wine cellar, your view of Cape Town and its celebrated rock is remarkable. It’s even better with a glass of champagne in hand. A rondawel could have been built here and people would have been raving. But Sir David Graaff wanted to go all out to make sure that this building harmonised with the surrounds and consulted Ying-Chung Tsai, a Chinese geomancer, on the feng shui of the space.
Whether Charles Hopkins, the burly wine-maker, took some of this advice for the wines I do not know, but with new vineyards in an exciting location and a brand new cellar that he helped design, Hopkins looks pretty relaxed. The one glimmer of apprehensiveness was at the prospect of making pinot noir.
For all its cool climate credentials, it’s interesting to learn that the Durbanville region has barely nine hectares planted to pinot noir, the prestigious red grape that many wine farms hurry to plant if they have the chance. Of course, pinot noir has a reputation as a very tricky customer, so that may be why Durbanville has largely adopted merlot as its champion red.
De Grendel, perched as it is on the very crest of Tygerberg with views of Table Mountain and the close sea has a distinct claim to being a temperate site. So with their new releases and the opening of their new wine cellar, they bravely also showed a barrel sample of their first pinot noir, made, admits Charles Hopkins, with many calls to more experienced pinot noir hands.
The sample is packed with fruit and suggests that pinot could have a happy future here, but De Grendel are hedging their bets and have also released a merlot and a shiraz, both of which show an interesting earthiness and are, happily (for me), wines that fall on the elegant and supple side of the fence rather than the big, bold and over-extracted.
As a Durbanville farm, they do well with their sauvignon blanc, theirs is a wine that shows desirable fruit, but also a great length, balance and mouthfeel – a combination that few Cape sauvignons have. Also just released is a semillon/chardonnay/viognier blend called Winifred. With peachy notes and a good texture, this wine will be best in a year or two but is well worth finding now, for it is made in very limited quantities.
Sir David Graaff’s father, the politician Sir De Villiers Graaff, was apparently not enamoured with the idea of planting vines on this historic stud farm, but one hopes he’d be pretty pleased with the results so far. Or is that perhaps just the effect of the cellar’s feng shui?
I agree with all yo have said. Winifred was a definite win on tasting last week, What one cannot beat about the cellar is the view.