Wines of the New South Africa. Tim James
to embarrass the KWV—an organization which ordinarily seemed impervious to criticism and change. It is difficult to assert that your regulations are there in the interests of quality wine production, and then find yourself pilloried for failing to make provision for an innovator with vineyards in Hermanus.” The compromise was to amend the regulations to permit the sale and transfer of quota to another producer in the same or an adjacent region.
It’s worth taking a snapshot of the production situation around this pivotal period. There were some 300 million vines, at least half of them in the hot irrigated valleys of the Olifants, Orange, and Breede rivers. In 1979 the grape harvest was 6.22 million hectoliters, of which only 40 percent was used for wine, the rest going for juice or distillation. Of the natural wine, perhaps 10 percent could generously be called high-quality. In the vineyard, Chenin Blanc was still increasing its percentage share of plantings, and by 1979 had reached 29.3 percent (these percentages for grape plantings are adjusted from those published in contemporary KWV statistics, to exclude Sultana [Thompson seedless], not used for wine; this deduction has, sensibly, become standard practice in recent years for official statistics). Palomino followed (17.2 percent) but, like Cinsaut (now a mere 14.1 percent, having been overtaken by Chenin in 1968 at roughly 22 percent), it was on a downward path. Pinotage and Cabernet Sauvignon were the only two other red grapes in the top fifteen varieties, with both under 3 percent.
In fact, Cabernet, even at that miserable level, had greatly increased its plantings during the 1970s. The imminence of new legal controls restricting the use of variety names had trebled the price of the grape between 1970 and 1973 alone. Frans Malan of Simonsig, an early official “estate,” remarked at the time that it was now starting to be “a paying proposition” to grow more of the “‘noble varieties’ . . . it has never been so before.” It was a decade that saw, as the Hamilton-Russell story indicates, a definite rise in the quota of high ambition in Cape winemaking, and the emergence of some framework to shape it—as well as encouragement from developments in other parts of the New World. The famous tasting of American and French wines in Paris in 1976 fed the confidence and ambition of more than just Californian winemakers. It must be said, however, that there was more conservatism and complacency in the Cape than there was acquaintance with the wines or the winegrowing and winemaking practices of other countries, a situation that was not going to improve much until the 1990s. However, although the focus of the serious consumer was increasingly on the estate wines and their claims about provenance, the merchant houses too were supplying some remarkably good wines, notably in the leading brands of SFW. Some of the Nederburg wines of the 1970s were still drinking very well more than thirty years later, particularly the selections made for the annual auction that Nederburg inaugurated in 1975, which has taken place every year since then. The auction was in itself a boost for quality, although it no longer plays the vital role it once did in bringing fine wines to the attention of the wine lover.
The best of the merchants’ wines certainly should have been good: they were able to draw on grapes and wine from some of the finest vineyard sites in the country, even if these were hardly performing at the limits of their potential. In 1966 a book was published called Fairest Vineyards, by Kenneth Maxwell, claiming to be the first to give a virtually complete catalog of Cape wines. A large percentage were fortified but, looking at the list of table wines, it is clear that the majority of even these were the blends of the merchants: just a handful of names are of the estates that were to become much better known in the next decade: Delheim, Muratie, Twee Jonge Gezellen, Schoongezicht, Rustenberg . . . and precious few others. Ten years later, another book was produced: Estate Wines of South Africa, by Graham Knox. It profiled forty estates that were producing their own wine, and an “Estate Wine Record” at the end listed a few hundred such wines.
The “estate” was a concept legislated by Parliament as part of the Wine of Origin (WO) Scheme, which came into being in 1973 (see chapter 4). The aims of the scheme were twofold: it provided an appellation system to assist with continued exports to a Britain now joining the European Economic Community, and responded to the demands of the small producers. In 1971 the Cape Estate Wine Producers’ Association started meeting with the governmental committee of inquiry into the production and marketing of estate wines, feeding into the process that resulted in the first version of the WO scheme. Controls over claims as to origin, variety, and vintage were to play an important part in the marketing and growth of the independent producers during the 1970s and beyond. They gave registered estates, defined then as the smallest units of the scheme, an enormous cachet—and also lent that cachet to other independent producers even if they did not meet all the requirements of estates or wish to register as such. It became established that, as Knox noted in his book, “not all Estate wine is fine wine, nor is it all necessarily superior to the produce of the wine merchants’ cellars, but the best wines of the country are grown and made on the Estate principle.” Meanwhile, of course, most of the farms now selling wines under their own labels continued to supply grapes or wine to the merchants.
Undoubtedly, much needed to be done if the Cape was to start producing more than a few isolated examples of fine wine, and if the number of smaller producers making serious, terroir-driven wines in their own cellars was to increase. What cellar expertise there was derived more from experience in Germany than in France—which might well have proved useful in making white wine, but was less evidently so for the reds. And as for the vineyards, amid all the Chenin Blanc (a fine grape but treated as a workhorse) and Cinsaut, there was a paucity of varieties internationally recognized as premium. A factor that was to play a role in improving the quality of both viticultural and winemaking practice from the 1970s onward was the extensive research undertaken at the Enological and Viticultural Research Institute. Generally known simply as Nietvoorbij, which was the name of the experimental farm just outside Stellenbosch where it was based, the institute was inaugurated in 1969.
The bureaucrats responsible for controlling new plant material and seeing to the quarantining of imports were less helpful in overcoming the desperate shortage of high-quality planting material. It could take a great many years to get a new clone or variety into the ground. The spectacular result of the steps taken by many of the Cape’s leading producers to import material illegally was a public scandal, and the Klopper Commission of Inquiry of 1986 found evidence that “the illegal importation of vine propagating material had started as long ago as the beginning of 1973 and had continued intermittently into the eighties,” with at least some knowledge of it on the part of the authorities. The focus of the inquiry was Chardonnay—or rather Auxerrois, as it was revealed that, ironically, this second-rate variety was what had mistakenly been imported and propagated on many of the Cape’s best-known properties—but other varieties were also illegally imported. Also imported, it seems, were some of the diseases that quarantining is precisely designed to guard against.
Among the most important figures accused by the Klopper inquiry were Peter Finlayson, the first winemaker at Hamilton Russell, and Danie de Wet, a great innovator at De Wetshof in Robertson and later a pillar of the Cape wine industry establishment. Another was a man who deserves credit for his role in modernizing the Cape vineyard and perhaps even more for his influence on local winemaking. This was Julius Laszlo, who arrived from Romania in 1974, armed with a doctorate in soil microbiology from Moscow. After periods at Nietvoorbij and Boschendal he took charge of technical development at the Bergkelder (meaning “mountain cellar”), part of the large Distillers Corporation. This was not only responsible for a number of increasingly ambitious ranges, but had entered into partnership with a number of leading wine estates (including Meerlust, Alto, and La Motte). The deal involved not just the crucial marketing of wines but also access to some of the best expertise available, as well as maturation (and bottling) in excellent conditions. Laszlo was innovative in, for example, his insistence on cellar hygiene, but is best remembered for introducing new small oak barrels as an important resource for makers of serious red wines.
The situation with regard to such wines was remarkably different at the end of the 1970s from what it had been ten years before. It was a time of innovation and experimentation on the estates even more than in the more ambitious, and better equipped, divisions of the wholesalers, where Julius Laszlo and Günter Brözel were revolutionizing production. The Cape Independent Winemakers Guild was founded in 1983 “to contribute to the advancement of the quality of Cape wines by mutually