What's wrong with South African wine labels
17 October 2007
Jancis Robinson notes a problem with Wine of Origin usage – and legislation

This article is reproduced, with permission, from the restricted access part of
Jancis Robinson’s website

Of all non European wine-producing countries, South Africa has most energetically hung its hat on the concept of terroir. Not that it actually uses such an emotionally charged French word in its generic promotional pitch, of course. Instead its slogan is ‘Variety is in our Nature’. The spiel about South Africa’s biodiversity is even to be found at www.varietyisinournature.com replete with detail on the uniqueness of the Cape’s many different wine regions. Even the geographical designation system is not called something linguistically straightforward such as ‘appellation’ or ‘denominaton’ but ‘Origin’.

All exported South African wines have to have a line on the label declaring it to be a Wine of Origin X’ where X is its origin, where it comes from. According to South African wine officialdom X may be, in declining order, geographical unit (really, really big areas), region (really big areas), district (somewhere like Stellenbosch) or ward (a smaller geographical unit such as Devon Valley within Stellenbosch, or perhaps Elgin within the Overberg region).

However, despite all of South Africa’s excitement about its ancient soils, unique ecosystems and laudable conservation activities, the vast majority of South African wine sold in its top export markets carries the bland Origin of either the Coastal region (basically anywhere from Cape Point to Paarl including Stellenbosch, Paarl, Swartland, Constantia, Franschhoek, Swartland and Tulbagh) or Western Cape, a geographical unit that conveniently includes just about every South African vineyard making wine for export markets – a sort of South Eastern Australia equivalent.

Except that while South Eastern Australia is commercially useful because it refers to a giant inexpensive inland irrigated (so far) grape factory,  it is precisely because South Africa doesn’t have one of these that it has decided to try to move upmarket and trade on its sense of place. The reason these vast Origins are used on labels is because the South African labelling laws are so strict. Whereas in much of the wine world, you are allowed to add a small percentage, often up to 15%, of ingredients from elsewhere in a blend and still use the principal appellation on the label, Cape laws do not allow even one per cent of a blend to come from outside the stated origin.

If winemakers blend, say, five per cent of Paarl fruit into a wine made mainly from a Stellenbosch vineyard, they would have to label the wine Wine of Origin Stellenbosch Paarl, which very few of them can be bothered to do, however common this is – especially as many wine farms are on the borders of two, or sometimes even three Origins (and, as throughout the New World, there is a tradition of sourcing fruit quite widely). Most of them fall back on the convenient Coastal or Western Cape nomenclature – which is not terribly informative for us wine drinkers.

I do realise that as the co-author of the World Atlas of Wine I am likely to care more about appellations/origins than most, but I do think that a) more and more wine drinkers are interested in exactly where what they are drinking comes from and b) the current rather vague labelling situation is at odds with South Africa’s ‘proposition’.

I would love to see some relaxation of the regulations so that wine producers were allowed to use a small proportion of wine from Origin Y and still call it Wine of Origin X, and/or see more producers taking the trouble to label their wines more with more precision. Western Cape (which can be found on a surprising proportion of really quite smart, expensive wines) really tells us nothing.

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