Tokara is an mind-blowing winery and vineyards development outside the town of Stellenbosch in South Africa’s Cape Winelands. It’s essentially a hobby for Rand Merchant Bank’s chairman GT Ferreira, but one that has seen him spend an extraordinary amount of money in creating a landmark wine development. Stone and stainless steel in equal abundance fashion a space-age environment where every fitting and every finishing has patently been chosen because it’s the best or the most expensive. Taste, however, has done more than just prevail. To work as winemaker in such an environment presents obvious attractions, but a not insignificant measure of expectation and pressure. None of this appears to have any outward effect on Miles Mossop, Tokara’s young winemaker, and son of well-known Cape Town wine critic and character, Tony Mossop. While the property has yet to release its first wine under its premier Tokara label, I am genuinely impressed by the cut and polish of the estate’s second label, Zondernaam. A barrel tasting of components of a potential Tokara blend of red Bordeaux varieties from 2003 also showed plenty of depth and texture, despite the young age of its vines. Tokara isn’t the only large-scale prestige development of its kind happening in South Africa at this moment. Although it is only expected to crush a maximum of 1,000 tonnes, other new projects are expecting to produce significantly more. Now that it has well and truly re-engaged the rest of the wine world in trade, South Africa is creating a new and modern wine infrastructure and is setting its standards high. There’s no room for complacency anywhere in Australia.
