The Cape wine industry turns 350 years old this year. While the first vines were planted in what are today known as the Company Gardens, the first commercial plantings were further down the peninsula, around Wynberg (Wine Mountain) and on Van der Stel’s farm, Groot Constantia, which was proclaimed in 1685. Later, in the hands of Hendrik Cloete (from 1778), Groot Constantia became world famous for its natural sweet-style wine made from Muscat grapes. This wine, made from very ripe, but not botrytised grapes, is now replicated in the Vin de Constance of Klein Constantia and Groot Constantia’s Grand Constance.
Today, Constantia symbolises both Cape wine’s history – and its future. Those early farmers knew what they were doing. Choosing gently-sloping land with good soils and a view of the ocean, the cool sea-breezes mitigated the heat of summer and helped them make balanced wines. Another influential factor has always been the Constantiaberg itself, which casts long shadows over the vineyards in the afternoons, as the sun sets on the other side of the mountain. By the late 20th century, Constantia’s reputation was built on its white wines, as many of the newer clones of the red varieties need more sunlight to ripen ideally.
The local wine industry has changed in a number of important ways since our re-admission to global markets. Technologies are better, clones are improving, and wine-makers travel to make wine and learn from international peers. At home, there is a spirit of discovery – and no more crucial than the establishment of new areas for the planting of vines. Previously farmers mainly worked in the traditional areas of Constantia, Stellenbosch and Paarl and on the flatlands or gentle slopes where it was easiest; now new regions are being farmed – and the vineyards are climbing higher.
The winery Constantia Glen is a great example of the new in the old. Here the vines are planted high on the Constantiaberg slopes, just before the spill over onto the Hout Bay side. The height and access to a few more aspects allow some of Constantia Glen’s vineyards a couple of hours more late afternoon sun – perfect for the ripening of red varieties. So whereas the white to red ratio down the valley is dominated by white; here red is king. Altitude has other benefits like different soil profiles – they are often more rocky (compared to the finer weathered soils down slope). These stonier soils undoubtedly give the wines a different dimension.
350 years on, and Cape wine is still evolving. For all our successes, it’s worth reminding ourselves that three and a half centuries is not a long time in the world of wine. Even constant Constantia is changing.

The Original Icon – Klein Constantia Vin de Constance
Made from Muscat de Frontignan grapes which have not been botrytised, this is a powerful wine of undeniable sweetness but also rich in complexity. They age famously: bottles from the late 18th century can still be enjoyed! First made during the long reign of the Cloete family, the wine became famous in Europe but then disappeared towards the end of the 19th century when the Cape wine industry was crippled by the phylloxera louse. The current owners of Klein Constantia, the Joostes, re-introduced it in 1986.
The New Icon-in-Waiting – Constantia Glen 2007 Bordeaux Blend
Since their first bottling of Sauvignon Blanc in 2005, the property’s wine has caught world-wide attention, winning numerous awards. But with 80% of the farm planted to red varieties, it is this red blend that will now become Constantia Glen’s calling card. This is a wine of excellent balance and fantastic elegance, made by Karl Lambour in consultation with Bordeaux’s Dominique Hébrard of Cheval Blanc fame. If you thought fine red wine starts clumsy and tannic, you will be stunned by the feather-soft tannins of this still-young wine. Certainly a label to watch closely.

Of our local star golfers engaged in this 19th hole activity, we can list Ernie Els, David Frost, Retief Goosen and recently Gary Player. Cleary, these men don’t spend much time picking grapes, hauling pipes or rolling barrels. What they do is to find experts to collaborate with, to make the wine for them. These wines, with the famous name imprimatur, sell pretty well (and have captive markets in clubhouses).

Interestingly, all the wines made under the names of these golfers are red wines. I can only imagine this is because the bywords here are luxury and premium. The first of these wines I encountered was the Ernie Els, made by the team behind the Rust en Vrede and Guardian Peak wines. It’s been made since 2000, so now has something of a track record. This wine is rich and modern, but always made from the traditional Bordeaux varieties so that it retains a classical style. You can count on it to impress.
For some reason, I have only recently tried the David Frost, from his own farm in the Voor Paardeberg. A former Rust en Vrede winemaker is in charge of the wine making, interestingly, and of the four red wines in the range, I most enjoyed the “Par Excellence,” despite its name. It’s also made from the five Bordeaux stalwart varieties and is bold in style and tends towards the over-ripe. The other wines, single variety Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Shiraz, took this too far and were far too big and alcoholic for my taste.

Recently, the Gary Player “Muirfield 1959” 2003 was released, made by the Quoin Rock winery. This is the most probing wine of the lot, since it’s a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Shiraz and Pinotage. It’s very rich, both on the nose and palate, where it is remarkably dense – and has an intriguing savoury dimension. Certainly a masculine wine, it continues to roll powerfully over your tongue, perhaps too forcefully, but I have great confidence in the Quoin Rock team so will be intrigued to track its development. Only nine future vintages are planned (to commemorate his nine Majors).

The bottle that arrived was vintage 2001. Faced with the choice of drinking a fresh 2007 vintage red or a 2001, I will always choose the older. A red wine needs a few years to settle. Tannins knit, polymers join up, acids integrate. Some secondary flavours, called “bottle age,” often develop which add to the complexity of the drink. Besides all that, here in the Cape we so often drink only the young stuff that it is a treat to get older wine to drink.

Wasn’t always like this of course. When cellar maturation was the norm, reds were designed to age – they were pretty tough to drink before a few years had elapsed. Today, the approach to wine-making and style of wine has swung 180 degrees. Reds are built to drink now. Both for rapid commercial turn-over and because the perception is that the market does not like tannin, it likes easy-drinking.
Hence, nowadays, many of our red wines do not age (in the sense of continuing to improve) for much over five years. These wines are less tannic, softer and more approachable in youth, and the corollary is that they do not mature and improve for long. In the old style of wine-making (still practised in many parts of Europe), a red wine is hard and unapproachable in its youth, tannic and leathery. After five years it’s beginning to be drinkable, but it’s only soft and smooth after 10.

“Modern” wines are “pre-integrated” through riper fruit and soft handling and age is often not a prerequisite to further pleasure. The flip is that they will not go the same distance. In many ways, the red that really needs a decade to reach optimal drinking is now a relic of another era. This column salutes the 1975 Zonnebloem Shiraz. A month ago, still a wine to enjoy.

They’ve also started a harvest festival in the roots sense, where music and merriment replace commerce, uptight music and desultory picnic baskets. At the first one, the new Solms-Astor wines were launched. There’s a white blend, a red blend and a curious pétillant Shiraz. The blends are great table wines, easy-drinking but not simple, and lovely for the fact that they are dry wines without residual sweetness. They also have great names, the white called Vastrap, the red Langarm, and the 2007 vintages sell for R46 each. And if you are generally bored with clichéd back label blurb, check these out.

Another wine that makes good, lively drinking without being OTT is the Elgin Vintners Shiraz 2006. It’s got good spice notes, lots of fruit but also a tangy quality that refreshes. Only problem for me is the R78 price tag, I think this is more of a R60 wine.

Been launching into some older wines recently, opened the 2001 Delheim Vera Cruz Shiraz alongside their 2001 Grand Reserve. 2001 was a good vintage, and seven years should show these wines in a great light. This was true for the delicious Grand Reserve which has integrated beautifully and is really a polished wine – but less for the Vera Cruz which is tired and somewhat flabby. It’s still my opinion that the modern Cape makes Cabernets and Cab blends that age well, but have not yet cracked the code on Shiraz.

Of course, I say modern Cape because we now make wines that are easier to drink in their youth, and are less likely to age as well as the Cape reds made in the 1970s and 1980s. When you taste a 1974 Fairview Pinotage that’s still a lively, delightful wine today, you really appreciate this. In its youth, I heard from current winemaker Anthony de Jager, it was an austere, rather forbidding wine, with firm tannins. When last have you tasted a Cape wine that sounds at all like this today?

So I said no theme, but I have come back to a recurring feeling I have that our modern reds, for all the back label promises, are ill-equipped to mature (in the sense of improving) for longer than six to eight years. Whether this is actually a bad thing is debatable.

Fourrier is returning to his roots. For a region that is already pretty fixed on tradition, this is something. He grows his vines without the use of any chemical fertilisers, and never uses vine stock treated for disease resistance or high yield. It’s about respect for the natural order. He waits until a vine is 30 years old before he uses its grapes to make Domaine Fourrier wine, until then he considers them immature. Aside from the fact that plant virus wrecks many of our vines within 20 years, our growers also have little tolerance for a plant with the small yields of an older vine. For most of them, it’s about quantity more than quality.

Fourrier then makes his wines using as little new wood as possible – no more than 20%. He has a number of reasons for this. In terms of wine quality, he states that “oak is for the slow breathing of the wine, not for taste.” He is after fruit purity, not barrel flavour. Again, consider the local model. Almost every producer chasing high quality “treats” the wine to 80-100% new wood. “Treats” means both an indulgence and a treatment, for the powerful flavour that oak imparts is one that we, the consumer, now think is the taste of fine wine.

But consider the other meaning of “treat”. New French oak, or any oak, is a dwindling global commodity. To use new oak, the prime staves from an old, slow-growing tree, primarily to flavour a wine, and then next year to ship another few hundred new ones in, for their flavour, is supremely wasteful – even arrogant. As supply dwindles, the luxury will dissolve anyway, so expect the oak flavour you are accustomed to to soon come from flavourants.

Fourrier also has a great deal to say about cork. For a Frenchman, he is unusually critical. Though he does love their place in wine tradition, their failure rate has led him to revert to the old practise of sealing all his bottles with wax. 50,000 bottles are all hand sealed. Wax is the perfect substance to prevent the exchange of gas, and the subsequent oxidation of the wine, that a poor cork allows. Cork, too, is a natural product under threat from commercial expansion. Did you know that men with guns patrol prime forests to prevent theft of bark?

The distinction is one of philosophy. Williams, an articulate and thoughtful wine-maker, wants to capture the soul of the Meerlust property in the wines, not follow a template that has been set in Bordeaux. Therefore, to take these grapes, native to Bordeaux, and to make a wine that tastes rather of this corner of the Cape than of that corner of France.

Tasting back over older vintages of Rubicon, it is clear that the philosophy in the past was to mimic the French model quite closely. Vintages 1986, 1991 and 1994 all show a lean and tannic character, with rather strappy acidity. But from 1998 onwards, the wine first becomes more “new world” – riper and richer and more handsomely wooded – and then gradually more refined until we reach the elegant 2004.
Williams says that his marketers rein him when he starts talking about soil. Before eyes glaze over, he relates how Meerlust has ten soil types and, within this, 50 different forms. This diversity is the puzzle that the winemaking team have to unravel in order to create wines that are both excellent and unique to this property.

If this sounds like a daunting task, it is, and Williams is the first to be humbled by the immensity of the challenge – one that is unlikely to be completed in his lifetime. Fortunately he is working with a family, the Myburghs, that understand the meaning of long term – they have been farming here (and making wine) since 1756; which is beginning to look like a term that can compare to Bordeaux!

Talk also turned to the price of the recent release. At R230 there is ample evidence that this is a very fair price, probably even a good price. Take the heritage factor of this property. If ever there was a farm and a wine that suggests iconic status, this is it. With so many Johnnie-come-lately producers charging more than R500 per bottle, you have to respect a more “honest” price. If you don’t really buy into that stuff, consider that the farm only releases Rubicon after four years of maturation (as opposed to most others at two years) and that the wine from this point on has a proven track record of maturation potential. Your R230 spent now will look trifling in ten years. And we all know that’s guaranteed.

Is a good wine list a long one? No, although it is more likely to be better than a short one by sheer number of chances to hit the sweet spot, a wine you really want. Shorter lists can have these sweet-spots if they are well-chosen and/or interesting. Well-chosen can mean different things, depending on the style of the restaurant. Broadly, for a fish spot, a predominance of whites makes sense – and the reverse for a steakhouse. Not just plugging in the same generic list.

Well-chosen also means more particular attention to the wines on the list, and in my books that means wines that have been chosen to suit the menu and the place and that show some imagination. Interestingly, you may not always find this “well-chosen” attribute in a big list. A restaurant may have a bible of a list, but be populated by all (and that’s no exaggeration) of the usual and “fashionable” suspects, but very few very unusual or quirky suspects.

A good list shows depth of knowledge. The start of a good list is the turn away from one that is dominated by the big players, or generated by them. Any list with a producer’s logo on the cover is most often the sign that this will be an average to poor list. Depth of knowledge means that the proprietor has chosen to look into wine and to come up with some personal options, and not only the rep’s “choice”.

For example, in the bible list I referred to, there was a “garagiste” section, where “hand-crafted” (as opposed to machine-engineered?) wines were listed. While this is welcome, I also want my garagiste wines to be good wines, not just to fill this category, which was the unfortunate case here. Knowing that their garagiste picks were duds made me uncomfortable about the rest of the list and the minds behind it and although it was big enough to offer joy, it did not make me rate it a good list.
It’s better in my eyes not to have all the categories but to offer interesting wines, than to strive to offer each variety. Lord knows we have many hundreds of producers, and a little exploration will easily create a personal list, where focus and story is more important than comprehensiveness.

The wines of Dr Loosen, made around the town of Bernkastel in Germany’s Mosel valley are a case in point. In many respects, these wines are extreme. Planted on vertiginous slopes that pickers have to traverse carrying 50kg baskets, many of his vines are over 100 years old. The marginal topsoil lies over a rocky slate substrate, and every year the challenge is to accumulate enough heat to ripen the grapes. These vines typically have “hang-times” (the time the bunch stays on the vine before harvest) of 170 days – compared to our average of 110 days.

The Rieslings produced in these conditions are remarkable. From the non-estate “Dr L Riesling” made from grapes sourced from around the area in general to the single vineyard wines, they all share delicacy matched to complexity, and an incredible freshness that comes from what Loosen calls the “mineral-driven acidity”.

This natural acidity is a marvel. It’s lively, and while it is intense, it is never harsh. For Loosen, this natural acidity is the core of the wine, along with their low alcohols – his are all around 8 percent. While this means that there is also a moderate level of residual sugar, the wines are bright and never cloying as a result of to these appley acids.

While the Mosel climate with its gentle summer heat plays a part in achieving this acidity, the chief reason is the slate soil with its high potassium content. Put this together with centenarian vines, and you have a unique set of influences that can be described as terroir without striking a false note.

Can South Africa make Riesling like this? Simply put, no. We do not have these conditions or these vines. We do make a few adequate Rieslings, but the difference lies in that acid line and the alcohol levels. Our acidities tend to be hard and sharp, and not supple and refreshing; and our lowest alcohols sit at 11 percent, which would be super ripe for the Mosel. And we’re nowhere close on the hang-time calendar, which is where the grape develops flavour and complexity.

But, like any grape, Riesling is adaptable. Riesling is also good at retaining a sense of self, of varietal typicity, no matter where grown, so our local examples are a very welcome antidote to yet another Sauvignon Blanc.

Loosen visited as part of a series of tastings organised by Jörg Pfützner. For more information on the wines: info@rieslingclub.co.za