Most of us would say an 8-3 win was something of a trouncing. A result you could relax about. But if any Australian present in Cape Town to witness our country’s recent 8-3 routing of South Africa in the inaugural South African Airways Shield Wine Test returned to our shores with an inkling of complacency, he or she had better think again. Newly re-admitted into the world wine trade – although it was able to maintain trade with several countries throughout the apartheid era – South Africa is turning to its wine with the same level of excitement and commitment that has quickly seen it win a rugby World Cup and become arguably the world’s number two nation in Test Cricket. Perhaps it’s a little fortunate for us that with wine and vineyards being what they are, they simply can’t just turn on quality wine from a tap. Wine takes longer – but not that much longer that we can take afford to take our eye off our new rivals across the Indian Ocean. In 1996 there’s little doubt that Australia has more top-quality wine than South Africa does and that our average standard is a good leap ahead. But the South African wine scene is flushed with money and labour is cheap. Eager to improve, they are looking beyond their shores for expertise and encouragement, hiring top European winemakers and consultants to oversee new developments and to rejuvenate old ones. South Africans are mainly planting the in-demand vine varieties of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc. They can even make riesling and shiraz which taste straight from Clare and Coonawarra respectively. Their top pinot noir would leave many from the Yarra Valley, the Mornington Peninsula and the Adelaide Hills gasping for breath. Their industry is on the move. And by encouraging their country’s largest and most influential wine producer – the KWV – to renege on its power to determine quota limits, fix minimum prices and predetermine production areas and limits, South Africans have actively encouraged greater competition within its own industry and have greatly furthered opportunities for the rapidly growing number of smaller independent growers. The majority of South Africa’s ‘winelands’ of Stellenbosch, Paarl, Constantia and Walker Bay are dispersed to the north and east of Cape Town, within the hinterlands of the Cape of Good Hope. Soaring mountains and cliff faces encircle flat to slightly undulating established vineyards, the most recent of which are frequently sited high on slopes hitherto considered too difficult or risky for viticulture. A landscape painter’s paradise is merely enhanced by the omnipresent grace and simplicity of classic white Cape Dutch architecture, the special thumb-print specific to the winelands. Although the Benguela current cools the Cape to temperatures below those its latitude might otherwise suggest, most South African vineyards experience long, hot summers not unlike our own. Like our own fascination with cooler sites, many growers are seeking out higher altitude vineyards in the Cape to create finer and more delicate table wines, as starkly different from the richer, riper older styles of Paarl and Constantia as Yarra Valley cabernet is to Barossa shiraz. One of the most surprising moments of the Wine Test match was the discussion and subsequent revelation surrounding the identity of a an especially good, heavily-wooded rich, ripe shiraz, which to a person was being claimed by Australian and South African judges alike as one of their own country’s. To the Australians’ chagrin, they were wrong. The wine was from one of Stellenbosch’s most exciting (and expensive) new developments, Stellenzicht. In another instance of cross-cultural confusion, an especially concentrated and spicy cabernet sauvignon, accented a la Victorian style with eucalypt, menthol and mint, was presented to the general approval of the Australian contingent, each again assuming Antipodean origins. Wrong again. The wine came from another brilliant new Stellenbosch vineyard called Thelema and tasted no more or less Victorian than virtually every other red it produced. Like many others in the Cape, Thelema’s steep-sloping vineyard is totally surrounded by thousands of introduced eucalypt trees. Some of the best South African wines are made from sauvignon blanc – a variety with fashions a tighter, racier, leaner style in the Cape than it tends to in Australia, without compromising any generosity of varietal flavours. The Stellenzicht Sauvignon Blanc 1995 has a clean, crystal-clear fragrance of gooseberries and passionfruit with piercing fruit and a rapier-like cut of acid. Buitenverwachting (pronounced ‘Booten-vair-vachting’) made a grassier, but slippery clean Sauvignon Blanc from the same vintage, while Thelema’s is concentrated with cassis and lightly leafy flavours. South Africans are also developing quite sophisticated wood-aged wines from sauvignon blanc and semillon, from wineries like Plaisir de Merle (the showcase of the enormous Stellenbosch Farmers Winery, which also owns the highly successful Nederburg), Fairview and Villiera. They have also learned how to handle their vast areas of chenin blanc (which accounts for nearly a third of South Africa’s wine grapes) into surprisingly intense and complex wines of the lighter and refreshing variety, led by producers such as Perdeberg (whose 1995 Chenin Blanc is quite amazing). There’s little doubt in my mind that for the time being at least, Australia is streets ahead of South African in the chardonnay department. The Wine Test match clearly showed that while certain South African wineries are producing wines redolent of complex winemaking influences such as barrel fermentation and maturation and extended yeast contact, they do not yet rival the succulent richness, depth of fruit and balance of the better Australian examples, as demonstrated by the Leeuwin Estate 1992, the Pierro 1994, the Coldstream Hills Reserve 1993, the Cape Mentelle 1993, the Penfolds Barrel Fermented 1994 and the Hardys Eileen Hardy 1994. The best South African chardonnay I tasted was the Hamilton Russell Vineyards 1993 – a richly textured wine with stonefruit qualities deftly enhanced with heavy, but balanced oak and yeast influences. Sited in the new and cooler region of Walker Bay, Hamilton Russell clearly deserves its standing in South Africa as the country’s best maker of the Burgundian varieties of chardonnay and pinot noir. Few Australians will be familiar with the indigenous South African red variety of pinotage, a cross between pinot noir and the lesser French grape of carignan. Despite the well-intention move towards increasing the proportion of classical French varieties in their vineyards, South African grape farmers (as they are known there) are renewing their interest in this grape, in much the same way Australians are rediscovering their old vineyards of grenache. Pinotage is made in three ways: picked ripe and matured in large old casks like the classic Hunter reds of yesteryear; picked ripe and matured in a mix of new small oak and large wood; or picked a little less ripe and matured for two years in small new wood, very much in the French Bordeaux mindset. The former tend to be simple and porty, while the latter generally give the grape more new oak than the fruit can handle. I genuinely like the middle alternative, which Nederburg specialises in form special batch wines it puts up for auction when mature at South Africa’s premier wine event. It might be five years before I return to South Africa, but I am already discover just how far they will travel in that time. The news will not be good for some Australian growers, several of whom still blindly cling to the view that our country has some sort of a mortgage on the mid-price New World chardonnay, cabernet and sauvignon blanc sold in the wine stores of London and New York.
