It's not all that frequently that, in my modesty, I concur with the awards made by judges at the many wine competitions gracing the South African winemaking scene. Their hard and honest labours tend to produce lists that have (in my opinion) little more or less plausibilty than would be produced by a more random process. One reason why these usually skilled panels get so much wrong is that the number of wines they are required to judge is simply too large for most people's palates and powers of concentration to cope with under the pretty rushed conditions (a good sniff, and a swirl around a mouth still echoing with the previous swirlee is what most wines get).

Perhaps, if I'm right in this, the reason why the tasters in the recent Green Wine Awards so astutely came up with brilliant Reyneke as their star winery in the Organic Wine category was because they had to deal with a mere 50 wines of different colours and styles. The small entry suggests, incidentally, that there's little marketing clout in the idea of organic wine - not enough to compensate for the difficulties involved in green farming.

The competition category is officially, in fact, the more unwieldy "Best Wine from Organically Grown Grapes" - reflecting the fact that it is, in most international regimes, not the winemaking procedures that can be certified as organic, but just the viticulture.

Reyneke took the Red wine award with its Reserve Red 2007, a delicately smooth, lively, sophisticated (and, at around R320, pricey) wine from mostly shiraz. The winning white wine was the Chenin Blanc 2009 which Reyneke makes for Woolworths - also not cheap, at R125. Both these scored four stars in Wine magazine's system (the magazine was "associated" with the Awards, which are sponsored by the appropriately green-branded Nedbank). The sweet wine award went to Stellar for their Heaven on Earth (a mere R55). (See the Wine mag website for the full results.)

Another 2009 wine from Reyneke, simply called Reserve White, also rated four stars. It is one of a small number of Cape sauvignons made in mostly new oak barrels (most sauvignon is vinified in stainless steel tanks), and it is undoubtedly amongst the country's best from this fashionable variety.

The Reyneke family bought their farm on Stellenbosch's Polkadraai Hills in 1988, initially delivering their wine to a co-op. But young Johan Reyneke was struck by the contradiction of his studying environmental philosophy while also helping his mother to spray the vines with pesticides. Against financial and other difficulties, Johan persevered with the transformation changing to organic farming and in 2001 Reyneke's first organic Pinotage was produced, and soon the farm was in official conversion to full-on organic production. Finances have been helped in more recent times by a winery association with Vinimark.

Johan went further than mere organic farming - much further than a sceptic like me could follow without bursting into laughter and tears - into the lurid moonlit thickets of "biodynamic" mumbo-jumbo, of cow-horns buried in the corners of vineyards, of cosmic forces and of homeopathic treatments stirred in a clockwise (I think) direction to invoke vortices of energy. "The magic of nature", Johan calls it (and he's a man so thoroughly nice that I have reason to hope he'll forgive my unspiritual rudeness), but he does admit to the "creative tension" of being pulled between "magic" and science.

He loves his vines (I stole the pic alongside from Christian Eedes's blog about Johan) and wisely leaves the winemaking to others. It's actually a bit difficult to say who "made" these winning wines. Chris and Andrea Mullineux were involved, especially in the White, and so was Rudiger Gretschel to a small extent, and in fact Johan himself must have been partly responsible for the vinification of the Red 2007. (Rudiger, formerly of Boekenhoutskloof, is now ultimately responsible for all Vinimark's wine interests' production and is using the opportunity of making wines at Reyneke to keep his hand in - one of the most technically astute winemakers in the Cape, he is also a True Believer in biodynamics, apparently.)

But the point is, of course, that sensitive winemakers are content to let the wines go as unmolested as possible from the vine to the bottle, if the grapes are as good as those delivered by Johan Reyneke. The results, at least, are magic enough.

This is an expanded version of the article in the Mail & Guardian, 26 November - 2 December 2010