Rescuing sémillon
Down stairs, up steps, filing down passages between weeping, cold tanks and bumping our way between barrels into the darkest corner of the cellar, the little winetasting group came to an irregular row of stained, multi-shaped barrels.

Our group of four people had just tasted the premium white wines of the winery. We had started with the fresh Chenins and a tank or two of grippy, nutty Chardonnay in stainless steel. Down in the darkness of the barrel room, we had compared the fat Chardonnays in Allier and Nevers oak and discriminated between wild and many cultured yeasts, made pages of notes and looked forward with anticipation to the succulent promise of the reds.

But first, without explanation, bumping shins on barrel hoops, we made our way to the row of unmatched barrels. Just as we had done for the previous hour, we held our glasses forward dutifully to receive the dollop of wine from the barrel thief in the hand of the cellarmaster. In the dim light, the wine ran thickly into the glass and lay like a solid block in the base.

My nose was cold and wet from the atmosphere in the room and hunted in vain for a pretty scent. Then I tilted the glass to soak my tongue and felt a permeating and rapid change in where I was and what I was doing and how I felt about all of the others in the group. This wine I was swallowing was the reason I was in this cellar and I didn't know what it was or why it was stored in a motley collection of old barrels, some of which were so stained they could have once been the home of red wines.
We learnt that this was Sémillon made from the grapes in old block of 'Groendruif' [Green Grape] vines, bought in a batch lot of varieties, with unwanted white grapes linked to desirable reds. It had been barrelled by accident. The cellar had run out of small tanks when these grapes arrived late in the season and the only storage space for the small volume was a couple of dozen reject casks. Though the value of this block and its batch of wine had become apparent to all in the company, the troubled wine never found a home of its own and eventually became a small but valuable component in a major blend of Sémillon/Chardonnay designed for the UK market.

Year by year I followed its fortunes, but repeatedly it followed the same course to the market. When Bruce Jack asked me, a couple of years later, if I knew of a great, unappreciated Sémillon vineyard, I knew where to look. I found that a change of management had diverted the Groendruif grapes from the foot of the Groenberg to a new role. A revised policy of early picking had increased the size of the crop and the cellar was now using this to produce a light, clean, neutral wine that made a handy base for sparkling wine.

Bruce and I persuaded the grower to let us try to match the wine I remembered, and a few months later we harvested the grapes as late as we dared: succulent, golden and in many cases almost withered. We let the wine make itself in barrels in a cold room and named it Green on Green after the variety and the location. Three vintages on, we have learnt that this great vineyard can only show its value if each vine has only the number of bunches it can fully ripen and then the cellar team have to cooperate by standing by, unflinchingly allowing the process to reach its peak, even though the vines seem barely able to cope.

Snow -slope Chardonnay
It is obviously difficult to differentiate the great vineyards from the good ones. On the face of things, as the saying goes, there's little difference. You need good drainage, depth to the soil for the root system and adequate moisture for the plant during the hard times, in particular, the final stage of ripening. Climate plays a role, as any stress must be manageable. So generally we look where temperatures are lower. But should we be looking for lower maximums, or lower averages or medians, and do minimum night and even winter temperatures play a role? When we know the answers to these questions (as we clearly don't), everyone will know where all of the great vineyards are.

Right now, we're in the early days of the hunt.

Long ago, the folk wisdom in Australia said that you should look in wheat or apple country. During 1996, I heard that someone growing apples in the mountains north of Oudtshoorn had planted Chardonnay and several other white wine varieties. I set out to find this man, mostly to see if the story was true.

There are not a lot of vineyards around Oudtshoorn, but they are never far from the water source on the flat plains. My directions took me past the last of these near the foot of the Meiringspoort Pass and I headed up this winding conduit linking the Klein Karoo with the elevated plateau of the Great Karoo. Near to the top of the Pass, I moved onto a dirt road and traversed several farms, bumping over the boundary lines marked by sheep grids, heading ever upward into the Swartbergs until I found the homestead I was looking for. I expected to see an apple farm with new plantings of vineyards. Instead I found a typical Karoo farm, with donkeys, chickens and flocks of baby ostriches around the house and in the distance, against the ridge, the expected neat rows of vines. I learnt that the farm's apple orchard had been stripped bare of bark, leaves and fruit by a catastrophic hailstorm during an earlier summer.

I had been invited to stay the night and, it being mid-November, had brought only a light change of clothing. Remember, I was staying just north of Oudtshoorn, in the Karoo. Before dark, my hostess took pity on me and brought me a choice of jerseys. At dinner, I was warned to make use of the electric blanket when I went to bed and asked if I wanted to see the frost protection team in action when the frost alarm sounded during the night. I learnt that the minimum temperature each night that week had ranged from two degrees Centigrade to minus three, and tyres would be set alight if necessary every night until the danger passed, sometimes as late in the year as Christmas.

This elevated valley, north-east of one of the peak ridges in the Swartbergs, is over one thousand metres above sea level and is cold at night throughout the year. Even peak maximums in summer are lower than we enjoy in the Boland. And once or twice each winter the snow that regularly blankets the high slopes of the farm even falls in the vineyard.

I found the soils to be mostly a mixture of decomposed shale and clay and the white variety vineyards showed promise. But the owner had joined the co-operative winery, his fellow members didn't see their way to being co-operative with me, and I didn't know how we would transport the grapes back to Paarl anyway. So that was the end of that for a couple of years. Until we made wine from the Green on Green vineyard. Then I made another call to my old friends in the mountains.

In 2002, Bruce and I made a small batch of wine from Chardonnay, just to see what influence this extraordinary climate would have. We were captivated, and named the project 'The Snowline'. In 2003 we ap-proached the mountain vineyards in earnest and started with a logistics planning programme. Bruce is a master of many skills, and one of his greatest tricks is to bring grapes from their mountain eyrie 600 kilometres to the winery at the Strand without their exceeding 10 degrees of temperature. And I forgot to say that this happens in March. I have concluded that some of his team must sleep sometime - perhaps they take turns during the day.

Old-vine shiraz
I had found a couple of other notable vineyards in that same year; one a baby in the Langkloof, only 15 kilometres from Sedgefield, and another an old Shiraz block in Riebeek. The Langkloof vineyard had been found as a result of my first Oudtshoorn trip, looking for the vineyards near the apple orchards, and my enquiries prompted a call from an ostrich farmer, planning to plant a vineyard in a promising location.

The Shiraz lead, on the other hand, came from some standard gumshoe detective work. There are few very old Shiraz blocks in South Africa, and very seldom are they found on co-operative winery supplier farms. During the last 40 years, red grapes have only been in demand for two or three, mostly brief periods, following a shortage. When the supply of red wine readjusted, every co-op manager would get roughly the same message and, somewhere, another red vineyard would be replaced.

But this ancient vineyard in Riebeek had survived many calls for culling. One year, after the bulldozer left, there was only one little block of red grapes left on the farm. And the vineyard only survived because the winemaker at the co-op always had had something special to say about the quality of the grapes. He had often tried to keep the grapes in this block separate from the rest of the co-op winery's Shiraz harvest, to keep the delicate flavours of these minute grapes apart, but the vineyard often produced as little as seven tons of grapes and the cellar wasn't designed to look after small volumes.

So Bruce and I found ourselves with a tiny batch of Shiraz, made from an uneconomical block of straggling, gnarly old vines, soon to enter their fourth decade. We named this venture 'The Outsider' as a tribute to the survival qualities of the vineyard.

The first releases of The Snowline and The Outsider wines will take place later this year, under the Jack and Knox label. Grahan Knox is a wine entrepreneur and the author of a number of books on South African wine.