A beginner's quest for definitive Kaapse Kabinett

Armed with little except passion, useful contacts, and some slightly misplaced confidence, wine-writer Jean-Pierre Rossouw set out to make some wine. All so nearly went well....

After long enough lamenting the steady local decline of one of our favourite white varieties – Rhine riesling – the two of us decided the solution was simply to make some ourselves. In particular we missed the dry, aromatic style (real riesling, as far as we were concerned).

We had never made wine before, but had both been keen tasters for a number of years, knew the basics of Balling levels and pH; besides, I had spent about three weeks in a cellar over two harvest seasons. I had learned there that wine-making is mainly an exercise in pulling pipes and climbing ladders, and I had come to the conclusion that the words of one winemaker – ‘grapes want to become wine’ – were the gist of the technical issues. Along with that, we knew the enemy number one was oxidation, and that the golden rule in the cellar was hygiene. We had nothing to lose, and besides, we had two great advantages – the opportunity to ferment our must in a cold room at any temperature we desired, and the gracious advice of a few of the Cape’s best winemakers.

We had no meters or gadgets, but we had the essentials: carefully selected yeasts, sulphur, protein stabiliser, and gas to cloak our wine. Since our goal was a dry wine, we reckoned we would judge completed fermentation by taste. What we were after was a taut, steely wine, with good classic riesling aromatics. We hoped to capture these though a longer, cooler fermentation. We decided to acquire juice (we had no means to press grapes) from two different farms in order to achieve a middle road between the two dominant Cape styles: full ripe and fruity, and the less ripe, leaner, steely style (which is increasingly rare). Further, we decided to try a few different vinifications on each batch: fermenting from off-dry to dry in three different ‘tanks’ and then blending for our ideal wine – a Kaapse Kabinett.

Off we went to the first of the two farms. ‘The baboons have eaten our best grapes’, we were told, ‘come back in a few days when another block comes in’. When we did go back, the assistant winemaker wandered in to tell the boss that the riesling juice he was about to give us had been inoculated the night before. As compensation, we were offered some chardonnay juice from their best block, as well as some botrytised riesling. Not wanting to seem churlish, we accepted. Suddenly we were chardonnay makers, a position we had not anticipated. Nevertheless, we at least wouldn’t have any oak.

The second pick-up was exactly the juice we had expected. In the meanwhile we had inoculated the first wines, resisting the urge to try a natural ferment. We decided on a 10-12oC fermentation temperature, realising that the botrytised noble late harvest wine would involve a long wait. Glass jars with S-pipes were our vessels – some 20-litre, some 10-litre, in order to be able to stop the fermentation at different levels and to and indulge in our blending. True micro-vinification this was, with a total of about 200 litres of wine on the bubble.

At this point, we had already made a critical error without realising it.

The fermentation went well and lasted a good three weeks (not including the noble late harvest). As the mouth impression got close to what we imagined, andknowing that some acid would drop out in cold stabilisation, we sent samples for analysis. Our wines were too low in total acid, so we hurriedly added some. This was the mistake – it should have been done before fermentation started.

On the whole, we were very happy, though. It looked like we had preserved the fruit well, there was no dreaded oxidation in the colour or taste. We stopped fermentation with a lowish dose of sulphur, as we didn’t much like the idea of sulphur. This would turn out to be our second mistake.

We now added bentonite to clarify the wine and help stabilise it, then sent the wines into cold stabilsation. The noble was tasting very good, but we decided to go for a drier style than the norm and left it to bubble at its excruciatingly slow pace. Then it got a bigger dose of sulphur and off it went.

One afternoon somewhat later we started to blend. Our chardonnay showed primary fruit and reasonable fat leesiness, but seemed a little hard and phenolic, so we added a good dollop of the sweetest riesling to soften it, and that seemed to work. As for our premium dry riesling, we had good varietal character, but we were mortified to discover that the late acid additions had also made the mouthfeel overly hard. We were forced to blend back more of the mid-sweet stuff to balance the wine – but the result was, we felt, rather promising. Of what remained, we blended a fourth wine: an off-dry quaffer.

Hand-bottling using gravity and a suck-and-point pipe was followed by corking. We were ecstatic: our wines tasted, well, like wine. In fact, the flavours were good, though the added acids stood out. Tasters liked the riesling best, but the noble late harvest’s excellent fruit and engaging dryness was also enjoyed.

A few months later, our second mistake caught up with us – the white blend, our charming poolside drink, started going though malolactic fermentation, ejecting corks with abandon. ‘It happens in the best of families,’ one of our consultant winemakers said, then laughingly added ‘but not yet in ours’. ‘Ha-ha,’ we said, and ‘we’ll be back.’