Adventures in Cape terroir

Some of South Africa’s finest and most expressive wines are emerging from the Swartland –whose vineyards less than a decade ago fed only the anonymity of co-operative cellars. Tim James describes an area undergoing rebirth.

This article (although still very long for the internet!) is a shortened, slightly amended version of one which appeared earlier this year in Issue 10 of the British magazine The World of Fine Wine.

Driving north from Stellenbosch, equidistant from the Atlantic and the great chain of mountains spreading inland, one soon moves into the broad, gently undulating country that becomes the wheatlands – and scattered patches of vineyard – of the Swartland. The skies are enormous. Growing larger on the horizon is the granitic mass of the Perdeberg rising in isolation from the shale landscape. The rather sprawling mountain, its aspects complicated by kloofs and valleys,  has a sombre air, particularly in summer as the scrubby renosterbos darkens: it is probably this vegetation which led the exploring and hunting Dutch colonists in the late seventeenth century to call the whole large area ‘Het Zwarte Land’, the Black Land.

Herds of quagga – a sub-species of plains zebra – roamed here, hunted by the Khoisan people, but more effectively so by the colonists, who ensured the animal’s eventual extinction. A legacy of the ‘wilde paarden’, wild horses, is the name of the mountain, Paardeberg or, in Afrikaans, Perdeberg.

On these rugged slopes, where less than a decade ago all the grapes went into co-operative cellars, some of the Cape’s more serious and interesting winegrowing ambitions are already showing fine results. Most importantly, those ambitions are expressed primarily in terms not of ultra-ripe, super-extracted fruit and new oak, but of a determination to respond to the soils and meso-climates of the mountain, and of other terrains of the Swartland. The scale of these exultant adventures in terroir is as yet small, the fine and distinctive wines from the area few; the promise enormous.

When Alex Dale of The Winery in Stellenbosch, bringing a deep experience of Burgundy and the Rhône, started discovering the region through some of these new wines and then though  investigation, he saw – and tasted – he says, ‘for the first time the sort of true, authentic expression of site that I had thus far found somewhat lacking in the Cape’.

Perhaps a remarkable aspect of the last, fast-moving decade in the Cape’s long winemaking history has been that more than a handful of winemakers have not chosen the easy internationalising path to success. The 1995 wine ‘test-match’ against Australia, in which the Cape was trounced, was one moment which helped jolt the industry out of the ignorant, provincial complacency in which much, though by no means all, of it was set. For many commentators and producers, the lesson seemed to be a deficiency of viti- and vinicultural technical sophistication, and flights to Australia were packed with winemakers (and marketers) eager to learn. And many have, indeed, followed the way also pointed out by powerful winewriters and winebuyers of the UK, obsessed by Australian ‘forward fruit’ as they seemed to be in the early and mid 1990s and comparatively careless of more traditional claims. There is a continuity with the power and oak now being offered in courting the American critical hegemony. A solid core, however, and not just older conservatives, believe that the wine with which to win the world with must not, as André van Rensburg once publicly sneered at a famous and internationally successful single-vineyard Stellenbosch cabernet, ‘get its terroir out of a French barrel’.

The history of good South African wine did not, as some seem to believe, begin only in 1994, nor did the search to eloquently express local conditions. Now, perhaps better equipped through easier international contact and inspiration, a section of a younger generation is taking new responsibility. Sometimes in defiance of marketing wisdom, they are bringing what they have learnt in the vineyards and wineries of Europe to an understanding of the role of the viticulturist and winemaker in responding finely to the Cape’s terroirs, and seeking out those which offer most distinction and value. What is happening in the rediscovery, the reinterpretation as it were, of the Swartland, centred on the Paardeberg, is both signal and exciting.

Rediscovering the Swartland

Reference to the Rhône valley is common among the ambitious Perdeberg winegrowers, but Eben Sadie is not entirely flattered at the suggestion that he might be the Guigal of the Swartland – a half-joke relating both to the suavely modern finesse of his wines and the role he is playing in reminding the world of the area’s inherent quality. ‘Couldn’t I rather be Chave?’ he asks, a touch plaintively, and a touch ungratefully. (In a hundred years or so, perhaps; with less new oak….)

It would be premature, of course, now to suggest a resurgence à la Côte-Rôtie, and impertinent to hazard a qualitative equivalence to Hermitage – possibly a more useful model would, anyway, be Châteauneuf-du-Pape.  And the galvanising role must undoubtedly be shared with Charles Back of Fairview and Spice Route.

In the late 1970s the recently graduated Back spent a year working the harvest at the Perdeberg Co-operative cellars. In later years at his winery in Paarl, he says, he often remembered how easily ‘quality happened’ in the area. In the latter 1990s it became for various reasons possible for him to get involved there. His pioneering ‘reinfiltration’ of the region, as he calls it, was two-pronged. First, with partners (soon thereafter he bought them out) he established the Spice Route Wine Company near the town of Malmesbury, north of the mountain.

Secondly, he started exploring the mountain’s vineyards, seeking grapes for Fairview wines and for the new ‘Goats’ range – the latter enabling him to make deals with the local farmers more easily and escape the resentment associated with ‘cherry-picking’. It has been, says Back, ‘a matter of trial and error finding the best places; there are no hard and fast rules – there are desirable patches all over the area’: he is still exploring and learning.

If Back had early in his career caught the Swartland-Perdeberg bug, so too did the young winemakers he brought to the newly established Spice Route. Eben Sadie had been vinifying large volumes at Romansrivier co-operative, but came too with experience in Europe and the USA. He made the winery’s first few vintages, but the depths of his passion, energy and ambition needed something not larger, but smaller, more single-mindedly concentrated on achieving the ultimate expression of a terroir his own explorations had revealed as immensely promising.

While Sadie’s brilliant blend of chenin, chardonnay and viognier, Palladius, is entirely from Perdeberg grapes, in fact it is the whole large Swartland that he wants to express in his red wine at present. Columella – largely from syrah with about 15 per cent mourvèdre – is sourced from half a dozen scattered parcels, all held on long lease, with the viticulture under his meticulous control (there’s a great deal of driving over both gravel and tarred roads, as well as rough farm tracks, for Sadie). The productive soils he exploits range from the red clay-rich shale soils of the Malmesbury area, to the decomposed slate present in pockets of the mountains near Riebeek Kasteel in the northern part of the Swartland, to the decomposed granite characteristic of the Perdeberg – some with clay, some more stony. Each parcel is vinified separately, ‘according to its own demands’.

The different flavour profiles and structures Sadie has to work with combine to make the finest, most complex wine from the region, recognisable as having at its centre the combination of warmth, minerality and structural finesse that seems characteristic of the Swartland as a whole. Whether they are as distinctively terroir-driven as some of the otherwise less authoritative wines at present coming out of Perdeberg vineyards is debatable – at least, their aromas and flavours are not as marked by the herbal notes, especially lavender, that are common to many Perdeberg reds. What is certain is that the quality of the Sadie Family wines – for some enthusiasts not excelled by any in the Cape – have been as eloquent as Sadie himself in focusing attention on the potential of the region.

A widening circle

An early believer was Tom Lubbe, who worked for some time with Sadie at Spice Route, then established The Observatory – with a cellar an hour’s drive away in Cape Town, where he has since 2000 made wines from leased vineyards, mostly of Perdeberg syrah and carignan. With Lubbe now based in the Languedoc, sister Catherine takes major responsibility; the family have bought a farm on one of mountain’s westerly shoulders.

What has happened at Lammershoek and Scali is in some ways even more significant for the future of an area that is still overwhelmingly dominated by production for the co-ops – where many of the farmers (it is ruefully pointed out by the others) do not even drink wine: brandy and coke is the standard tipple. Lammershoek, which has been growing winegrapes since around 1750, was long a supplier to the co-operatives, but has been making its own wine since 1999 in the old cellar that had been derelict for fifty years. It also sells grapes and wine to some increasingly clamorous independents – including Alex Dale and Eben Sadie, whose modest whitewashed cellar is here, and who has exerted a strong influence on what is an increasingly attractive range of wines.

Scali is the new name (a play on the Afrikaans word for the farm’s characteristic shale) for a well-established bulk grape supplier, whose young owners, WiIlie and Tanya de Waal, have taken fire and are moving forward rapidly with their own wines. Not the least of their contributions to the region’s development, surely, are the regular winetastings they have inaugurated amongst their spirit-drinking – but increasingly interested – neighbours.

There are others already taking part in the area’s renaissance, both locals and newcomers. And so the circle widens. On a high slope of Willie Mostert’s farm Weltevrede on the south-western slopes of the Perdeberg is a small young vineyard. Mostert’s other grapes are as yet still sold off to anonymity, but the syrah growing on these newly carved contours is  destined for Eben Sadie’s Columella. In many ways it can stand as an example of fine Perdeberg winegrowing, taken a few meticulous viticultural steps further than usual. On the stony granitic soil, which is less decomposed here than it is lower down the mountain, the vines grow basically en gobelet (‘bushvines’ in South Africa) but, unusually for the area, each vine is trained to its own post, as commonly in the northern Rhône.

From up here, at a height of some 360 metres, one can see south across the flatlands to the Paarl mountains and, more significantly, westwards to the Atlantic. The coolness of the wind off the sea is a vital factor for the best vineyards of the region, which is generally undeniably warm, with a mean midsummer temperature some three degrees Celsius higher than in Stellenbosch, but with contrastingly cooler evenings. Tom Lubbe speaks of ‘a fantastic day-night differential, with temperatures in our vineyards falling over twenty degrees Celsius by early morning’.

Biodynamic principles govern the new vineyard – something Sadie is bringing to all the vineyards he controls. A further atypical element here is the irrigation piping along the rows, useful for establishing the vineyard and for particularly dry years. For most of the Perdeberg (the southern slopes somewhat exceptional in having more dam-water available because of a higher rainfall), the vines are left to the mercy of what water they can find – generally, thanks to the element of retentive clay, it is enough; in drier years in dryland vineyards, Sadie’s response is to drop some of the crop. Fortunately, more often than not, one of nature’s kindnesses here is a well-timed rainfall in December, prior to veraison.

The lower-yielding bushvine pattern is, if not the rule, certainly the tendency, especially in the drier parts of the Swartland: farmers have long learned that bushvines are not knocked as badly by drought. Charles Back tells of the problems he has had with the trellised syrah vineyard that produces grapes for the Fairview Solitude Shiraz. The stress suffered in the past few, particularly dry, years has been much greater here than in comparable but untrellised vineyards, leading to a notable loss of grape quality (the last released vintage of this wine was the 2002).

Viticultural experimentation proceeds, however. On Lammershoek, where all the new plantings are bushvines, winemaker-viticulturist Albert Ahrens points with satisfaction to the lower vegetative growth compared to his neighbour’s vineyard; this is a result of a new vine balance from severe suckering, aiming at earlier exposure of the bunches to the Swartland sun, which usefully ‘toughens up the grapes’. This trick, Ahrens says, comes from Priorat, via Eben Sadie. For a newly planted syrah vineyard on Scali, the Rhône practice of a single post for each head-trained vine has been adopted.

So lessons learned from around the winegrowing world are coming to this part of the Cape vineyard, put to the service of better expressing a different terroir. Tom Lubbe’s experiment is amongst the most radical, and  must exceedingly bemuse his herbicidal neighbours. Lubbe learned his basic viticulture from Gérard Gauby. The vineyards of Bosgarsfontein farm are strictly biodynamically cultivated [see previous Grape article on the Lubbe vineyards; the pinotage one is pictured here]. Leaving aside (which the Lubbes do not!) the more arcane associated rituals, part of the aim in using the indigenous vegetation as a permanent cover crop is to encourage ‘a healthier naturally occurring yeast population’. Tom Lubbe claims that the latest vintage from his 30-year-old chenin vines is showing the character of the scrub, rather than the more obviously varietal character of the previous year. Ripeness at lower alcohol becomes more viable too with these methods.

Syrah is not the only highly valued variety, though it forms at least the basis of most of the new-wave red wines. Realising the suitability of Rhône varieties for the area is not wholly new. The Swartland’s viticultural history remains to be written – it dates back some 250 years ­– and it is not clear what varieties were planted in the earliest years, but they probably included carignan, along with sémillon. There are still some older (up to 60 years) vineyards of carignan and grenache, though virused. At some stage grenache and mourvèdre (known then as mataro) joined the range, together with hárslevelü, but with the emergence of the cooperatives in the 1940s, the Rhône varieties started to disappear, as plantings changed to those useful for brandy and ‘co-op wines’. Chenin blanc, the Cape’s workhouse was among them, and some remaining 30-year-old vineyards, now farmed for quality rather than quantity, provide the basis for a few excellent varietal wines and blends.

If syrah, fashionable anyway throughout the Cape, is central to the plans of ambitious producers, it is probable that a blend of varieties will make for the best red wines, as in the warmer south of the Rhone valley. Late-ripening mourvèdre seems to be grape most cited as a desirable blending partner, and a number of new vineyards are already planted: the variety is already proving useful, adding freshness and acidity to ripe syrah and lowering alcohol levels. Decent clones of grenache remain elusive in the Cape, but once that problem is solved, the grape will certainly become established.

These are adventurers here, however, responding to their own environment, and the authority of the Rhône model will not preclude other possibilities. Charles Back reports exciting early results from barbera and petite sirah, and tempranillo has also been planted – by one of the farmers converted from brandy and coke.

A tasting report on a dozen top Swartland red blends accompanied the article. Click here to read it.

• Copyright The World of Fine WIne. Reproduced here with permission