Wines of the New South Africa. Tim James

Wines of the New South Africa - Tim James


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It was instigated by Billy Hofmeyr, a lover of Bordeaux, who was in the process of abandoning his career as a quantity surveyor in favor of developing his recently acquired small Paarl farm, Welgemeend. It was Hofmeyr who brought out, in 1979, not only the Cape’s first Bordeaux-style blend, but also its first blend of Pinotage with other varieties in the attempt to make a local interpretation of a classic southern Rhône wine. The Bordeaux blend was to be taken up enthusiastically through the 1980s, but the forerunner of the “Cape blend” was not to be much copied until the 1990s. (The guild was to drop “Independent” from its name and, particularly through its annual auction, arguably put greater stress on marketing its members’ wines than on advancing winemaking skills.)

      In many ways, the 1980s can be seen as a period of consolidation of the 1970s innovations, as well as preparation of the conditions that helped make possible the massive breakthrough of the 1990s, when political liberation at home opened the wine industry to the world. At this stage, of course, the situation in terms of exports was getting worse for the producers. The informal sanctions that had begun as early as 1963 took on greater, formal force starting in 1985: exports—apart from shady dealings with Eastern Europe—fell between 1964 and 1989 by about two-thirds. Other changes were more positive for the industry. The WO system continued to elaborate itself in terms of both appellations and controls. The limited market in quotas mentioned above did allow a small amount of innovation from the likes of Hamilton Russell, though independent producers of high-quality wines continued to be severely hampered by the quota system. The number of small producers was nonetheless growing, and the manufacturing wholesalers’ share of the market was falling. KWV power had severely limited the number of wholesalers from the early years, and complicated restructuring deals in the 1970s had resulted in the amalgamation of the two overwhelmingly largest of them, Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery and Distillers/Oude Meester, into one monopolistic entity, Cape Wine and Distillers. But this marriage was annulled in 1988—in the name of the free market, although the same shareholders retained control of both SFW and Distillers. The only competing companies of note were Gilbey (part-owned by those same shareholders), and Union Wines and Douglas Green (which soon united as Douglas Green Bellingham).

      The small local market (in the absence of an international one) for better-quality Cape wine was growing and becoming more exigeant. The indispensable guide to South African wine inaugurated by John and Erica Platter in 1980 rapidly became an annual one. The tenth anniversary edition of the Platter Guide briefly looked back at a decade that had seen the number of wines it described rise from 1,250 to about 4,000, and noted:

      Progress and proliferation, yes, both dramatic and erratic. Our first edition recorded one Cape chardonnay. There are now 40. And who would have guessed then that chenin blanc . . . would be overshadowed so rapidly and emphatically, as a dry white wine, by sauvignon blanc, which accounted for four labels then and 121 now. Only one methode champenoise sparkling wine featured in the first edition; there are now 17. The classic (Bordeaux) claret blend, a commonplace today . . . had yet to make its appearance, and amongst its first successful producers was an estate which hadn’t bottled a single vintage by 1980. Nor, for that matter, had some of our finest quality cellars in other categories—pinot noir, chardonnay, etc.

      Nonetheless, the fundamental situation of the vineyards was changing only slowly beneath this important development. By 1990, Chenin’s domination had grown, and it now constituted more than 35 percent of hectarage, while white grapes in general accounted for more than 85 percent of the total. Chardonnay was up from virtually nothing to nearly 1.7 percent, and Cabernet had crept up a little over the decade, to 4.2 percent; Syrah remained below 1 percent. In the early 1990s the surplus pool going to KWV for distillation and fruit juice could still take up 45 percent of the vintage. Another ten years on, and all these statistics were to be dramatically different.

      The end of the white minority regime in 1994 allowed for the remarkable changes in the South African wine industry that followed. In the shadow of this structural change came others: the collapse of the KWV quota system in 1992 and of the minimum price in 1994 were notable moments in the gradual dissipation of its once massive control and restrictive powers of regulation; in 1997 the organization was converted into a company. Although the KWV lives on as a large producer—memorably described by critic Michael Fridjhon as now just one hustler among the rest—the KWV era, with its positive and all its negative aspects, was ended.

      3

      GRAPE VARIETIES AND WINE STYLES

      VARIETIES AND VARIETALISM

      The history of grape varieties in the Cape is murky, from the time when van Riebeeck failed to specify in his diaries either the origin or the variety of his imports. Early Cape viticulture would have included Greengrape (Sémillon), White French (Palomino), Steen (Chenin Blanc), Muscat de Frontignan (Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains), Muscat of Alexandria, and Pontac. A large number of other varieties, sometimes mentioned to bewildering effect by travelers, were brought in over the years, though only a few of them became in any way established.

      Early commentators do not always give us reason to have confidence in their pronouncements. William Bird in 1882 speaks of Pontac (now identified as the original Teinturier) as “the same as the cote-rotie of the Rhone, the pontac of Guienne . . . and the port grape of the Douro”—a bizarre array. Bird also refers to the “steen grape . . . so called from the same grape on the Rhine.” This suggestion presumably refers to the many German vineyards including stein in their names, and indeed it is far from impossible that some of the grapes referred to as Steen were Riesling rather than Chenin Blanc—which adequately serves to indicate our inevitable uncertainty about the varietal mix of the past.

      Any experiments were set aside and things became much simplified, however, during the hurried vineyard expansion during the early decades of British administration in the Cape Colony: Sémillon (Greengrape) came to dominate overwhelmingly. Even so, we cannot be sure of what subsequently happened in terms of varietal planting over the nineteenth century, until some conscious efforts at improvement were made in the last decades, especially through the government farm at Constantia, which raised awareness about varietal identity—particularly when the question of appropriate rootstocks became an issue. The ravages of phylloxera did give producers the opportunity of replanting with superior—or at least recommended—varieties, but the replanting process was slow.

      We can, however, start being more confident about which varieties are actually being referred to as of the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1907 the young I.A. Perold, a temporary professor in chemistry at the University of Cape Town who had already shown evidence of his profound interest in wine and viticulture, was sent abroad by the Cape government, which recognized a need to widen the range of grapes available. He was to bring in 177 varieties, which formed the core of a collection that still exists at the Welgevallen Experimental Farm of the University of Stellenbosch (where he became the first professor of viticulture). Perold was also important in identifying various varieties in use locally (and in producing a new one, Pinotage).

      But for much of the twentieth century (the KWV years), quantity rather than quality counted. There was little diversification, and a great shift toward the dominance of white grapes suitable for brandy and, later, for fruity table wines. A historical chart of the two most commonly planted varieties after World War II shows a rather gratifying X shape, with Cinsaut’s line plummeting downward and Chenin Blanc’s as inexorably rising: the lines cross at approximately 22 percent of total plantings in 1968. From roughly this period we are in early modern times, starting to move toward the current pattern—though Chardonnay, for instance, was still to make its impact, and the changes brought about by reentry into the international market in the 1990s were a huge boost to the proportions of the “noble” varieties in general and black grapes in particular, at the expense, mostly, of Chenin Blanc.

      More statistics regarding the changes in plantings are given in the appendix, and chapters 1 and 2 have pointed to the major shifts over the past forty years, but before we move to a discussion of the roles of the different varieties it is interesting to note again continuing developments in recent years. The leading ten varieties at the end of 2011 were as follows, with the percentage of total plantings (in terms of vineyard area) given in parentheses, together with the change from the percentage fifteen years earlier:

      Chenin


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