Fundamental things

Some questioning of the situation of vineyard care in the Cape, from Kobus van Ierop

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The season has turned, the leaves are changing colour and it’s time to do some soul searching about your successes and failures and your future as a vineyard manager.... Three issues come to my mind immediately.

1. Are vineyards actually important?

Firstly: ‘Wine is made in the vineyard.’ What a joke. We hear this cliché at every occasion someone can prostitute this concept to their own advantage. Our vineyards in South Africa leave much to be desired. Go round from end December to post harvest and look at the sorry state of it. Maybe ten percent of our vineyards can compete with the best vineyards elsewhere. I’ll sketch you a scene: We arrive at a vineyard supposed to be producing wine at approx R150 per bottle that same season. End of December, yellow leaves due to NO irrigation (lines installed and water in the dam), no suckering done, only some of the foilage wires lifted, bankrotkweek [an unhelpful grass....] all over and a heavy cropload. Think this is an exception? Don’t kid yourself.

Why? Our winemakers all say that wine is made in the vineyard, but do you see any of them around between the vines before February? No, they are busy doing marketing or tastings. I meet so many excellent vineyard managers in South Africa, people that know what to do but do not get the opportunity. Why? Build a lovely cellar, build an impressive entrance, get a clever young winemaker, reward him (usually him) handsomely – and that’s enough: ‘die saak is reg’. Vineyard managers get paid a pittance and sometimes treated like the orphans in the team. Pay peanuts and get monkeys – or monkey’s work.

2. Where are the journals?

We have several wine magazines in South Africa but how many viticultural magazines? None. Go to the US or Australia or France and indulge yourself in their wonderful magazines covering all viticultural issues you can imagine.  Want to learn about … the effect of mulching on quality of wine? Go to any of the Australian, French or American websites and enjoy yourself. Pity their research is not always applicable here. Want to find the same answers in South Africa? Pay a consultant a decent amount of money and you just might find your answers.

3. Race and sex ...

We will never, ever be able to compete internationally if the single most important component of our wine – the grapes and vineyards – is not  planned, farmed, researched and approached with respect.

1. So many women are trained at our university and colleges. Where are they in the industry? Three female vineyard managers come to mind and more winemakers, but less than 10? If they are not out in the field or in the cellars, where are they why are they not growing or making wine?

2. It’s good to see more coloured or black managers in the vineyards. Hopefully this is a growing trend. The ones I work with are great.

We have to move forward and out of the Ice Age.

COMMENTS

From Roland Peens:
Great article Kobus, I can't agree more. Thank goodness there are vineyards out there like Vilafonté that are taking viticulture extremely seriously and creating world-class wines. Their 'precision viticulture' focuses on vineyard parcels down to the individual vine. They use satellite imagery, leaf water potential systems, sub surface drainage, vertical shoot positioning – I could go on. The question is; do we have the people in South Africa with this expertise? (Vilafonté has Dr Phil Freese, a world leader in viticulture from the US.)

Response from Kobus v I:
Phil Freese is indeed a great viticulturist. Maybe Roland was exposed to his expertise at the Vilafonte tasting when dr. Freese gave the viticultural background to the wines that were tasted recently. We have some  viticulturists in South Africa that can compare to the best in the world. Do you think it is only the winemaker that makes the Vergelegen V, the Rustenburgs, Tokara's or whichever good SA wines you prefer? No. It's people like Francois Viljoen, Johan Pienaar, Kevin Watt, Aidan Morton, Johan Viljoen, Neil Rossouw and many others that have an intimate knowledge of their vineyards and maybe a better understanding of the South African climate than overseas experts. But in the field we do not always get the support needed – not in terms of funding for research or publications or by acknowledgement from the industry. Students want to do winemaking, not viticulture because it's better paid and much more glamorous. Does any reader even know a SA viticulturists or vineyard manager’s name? Does any journalist have any interest in attending any viticultural seminar or field day?

From Cassuis:
Great article, but some things are overlooked and went unmentioned. Regarding wine being made in the vineyards, yes that is the case. But you need to state which wines you refer to – normal everyday ones, fly-by-night-marketing-is-all wines or the real ‘great’ ones working on a long term plan to make something memorable?
The trend of the past few years where 90% of farms deregistered from Estate status does not help. Not that I'm saying working in the Estate rules makes for better wines. But it surely forces you to be more attentive to your vineyards, seeing that they’re the only ones you got!!

As for vineyard managers not getting any spotlight, can’t agree more with you. Only one issue arrises here, how do you plan to showcase one viticulturist against another if the wine you’re drinking could be made of grapes from 5 different sites with 5 different viticulturist? Going on what they look like doesn't mean Jack either – that theory of the perfectly combed vineyard giving the best results have been blown out the water one too many times as well.

Again, we need more producers who focus on making wines expressing a sense of place and working with the same grapes on a regular basis for years on end.

No girls in the industry: it’s a pity, as the ones that are in the mix are tough and tenacious and do one heck of a job, we definitely need more ladies of the vine and wine. Let’s face facts – men aren't the only ones drinking vino!! especially in our brandy-driven country!

Kudos to those who dare to scratch where it never itched: that’s the only way to change the status!

And a point from Tim James:
The lack of recognition of viticulturists, while winemakers are lionised, is something we have often pointed to in Grape. For one thing, it is certainly about time that wine competitions stopped automatically giving the prizes to winemakers – specifically winemakers, not winemakers as representatives of the whole team involved. This is not even to mention the 'Winemaker of the year' awards. At the same time as people are mouthing platitudes about 'wines being made in the vineyard', they still treat wines as though they are only made in the cellar....

From a winemaker(ess):
PHIL FREESE, PLEASE! WHY DO YOU ALWAYS GO OVERSEAS FOR EXPERTISE - locally we have such good people, but nobody seems to give them the credit for their hard work!! Start opening your eyes, wake up! The girls in viti and viniculture are silently busy dethroning all men in the RSA!!

To which Roland Peens responds:
In response to the Winemakeress. I don't think hard work is really the answer. Its being a bit narrow-minded believing that we have all the viticultural expertise in this country when we only entered the wine community just over a decade ago. I taste enough green and weedy wines to judge that the viticulture in SA is not up to scratch. Its planting the correct varieties on the correct soil, in the correct region and then achieving the perfect ripness. Until that happens don't expect the recognition from abroad. Dr Freese has been dealing with the growing of fine wine in an international environment for 30 years. How many viticulturalists have had that length and quality of experience?

From Mark:
Roland while I can respect what Freese has done and is doing, can you honestly tell us that we have no serious viticulturists/grape growers in SA? You say we don't have international recognition - is that not a bit broad?

From Angela Lloyd:

To Cassuis: I think Cassuis misses the point when he/she contends the deregistration of many properties as Estates has affected the possibility of making `something memorable' because being an Estate `surely forces you to be more attentive to your vineyards, seeing that they’re the only ones you got!!' Having got out of the way that Estates per se no longer exist, there is now only Estate wine, the production of `memorable' wine (presumably a wine showing consistent quality and a sense of somewhereness) has everything to do with the proper matching of vine to site regardless of whether that vineyard is a unit registered for the production of Estate wine or not. How many of those units have every vine they grow perfectly matched to site? And surely Neil Ellis has long proved that it's better to have a sound, long-term agreement (even a partnership) with a grower in an area where there are all the most favourable conditions for the variety and style of wine Neil wants to produce?

Good relationships and understanding between grower and producer are just as important as between producer and retailer/winelover - I think it's a lesson still to be fully appreciated in our industry.

Where I very much agree with Cassuis is that we need more attention paid to making wines with a sense of place and viticulturists/winemakers `working with the same grapes on a regular basis for years on end.

I don't know how long a winemaker who is not a member of a family owned winery stays at one property on average, but winemakers always seem to be on the move and few stay around long enough to get to grips with knowing the vineyards and the wine they naturally produce. Then again, is the vine material available in this country of sufficient quality to allow for the sort of vine maturity that is able to produce site reflective wines that can mature rather than merely age?

To the winemaker(ess): Please don't be xenophobic. Apart from Phil and Zelma having invested in SA, we should welcome the opinions of people who have experience different from our own. Winemakers from all over the world come to work the harvest in the Cape so they can learn from us; likewise, South African winemakers work harvests in other wine producing countries to learn from them. Why not viticulturists? Such interaction doesn't deny the worth of our own experts but the exchange of ideas with outsiders can often open locals' eyes to improvements they might never otherwise have considered.

To which Cassuis replies:
I must apologise if my comment sounded like a call to go to Estate rules to make great wines. Your point of Neil Ellis is good, and excluding the rules of what constitutes being an Estate, he is the perfect example of how things should be done. To be more specific, and to reiterate the point which you also made, producers need to work with the same grapes from the same vineyard for 10 years and more to get a true expression of place.

Buying grapes willy-nilly from whoever is selling at the best price is a sure way to make bland and boring wines that make the international community ask the old question: 'What is a South African wine?'  Diversity is our strength, making wines of any and all description – but somewhere a common thread has to run through each producer's wine, hence Estate or, like Neil. 'lifelong' contracts with growers.