Wines of the New South Africa. Tim James
good deal of record-keeping and paperwork, as all stages of production are monitored to see that the basic sums add up: if so many tons of Cabernet grapes were produced on a particular farm in a particular year, producing so many liters, the authorities will get very anxious if a different volume is bottled. For a wine to be certified it must also meet a minimum level of quality, as adjudged by official tasting panels. In 1993, just 12 percent of wine was thus certified, but the proportion rose steadily each year to about 57 percent in 2011—showing a major increase in ambition.
The classic tourist image of the South African wine farm is of the whitewashed homestead and sturdy outbuildings sheltered by oaks at the foot of purple mountains, with grape pickers bearing (no doubt cheerfully) their boxes of golden or purple fruit to the crusher. But as the tourists (also hopefully cheerful) make their harvesttime way around the wine lands, they will inevitably have to wait occasionally behind slow-moving trucks piled high with grapes, and might see them turn down a side road toward what looks like a small oil refinery or industrial plant. With any luck the trucks will not have to stand too long in line there, with the sun beating down on their fragile freight, awaiting their turn to deliver the crop to the crusher. By far the larger proportion of wine, both certified and uncertified (destined for the distillery), is made at such places—unromantic, perhaps, but immensely impressive, with their miles of coiling or rigid pipes, dials and switches, hardworking attendants, and rows of gleaming and enormous stainless steel tanks, some containing a million liters of wine.
Most of these are the country’s cooperative wineries and the wineries that used to be cooperatives before converting to companies. There are still fifty-two of these “producer cellars,” as they are officially known collectively. More and more cooperatives have been commercialized since the early 1990s, largely because of the demand for higher-quality wines. Older arrangements of paying for members’ produce, with acceptance of everything guaranteed, are not feasible in today’s tougher and more exacting market. The KWV is no longer there to take, in its turn, anything unsalable by the cooperative—the national minimum price arrangement, which guaranteed an income, was finally abandoned in 1995. Now the former co-ops are generally owned, as companies, by the farmers who supply them with grapes; the latter’s income, however, now depends much more than before on such matters as grape variety and quality of fruit delivered to the crusher, because there is no longer an obligation to accept substandard or unmarketable material.
The producer cellars crush more than three-quarters of the entire wine-grape harvest—in 2011, 82 percent of the white grapes (some of which are grown specifically for brandy) and 72 percent of the red. Many of them have raised their game significantly, with increased attention to viticulture as well as to what happens in the cellar. A few of them now market single-vineyard and other prestige bottlings—more as a way of encouraging farmers to aim for quality and to build the general reputation of the winery, perhaps, than to maximize income. Generally they bottle and sell under their own label an increasing but still fairly small proportion of their own wine; the larger part is sold off to supplement the needs of private cellars or (most of it) in bulk to the wholesalers and exporters.
The wholesalers and specialist exporters—now including giants like Distell and the KWV—have a long and important history in South African wine. Before the rise of the private estates and of direct sales by the cooperatives, it was the wholesalers who were responsible for the overwhelming proportion of wines on the market, while the KWV had a virtual monopoly on exports. Wholesalers continue to market South Africa’s biggest brands locally and internationally, though they no longer have things all their own way. There are also far more of them around than there were in the ultracentralized days before the revolution of the 1990s. There were fewer than half a dozen bulk buyers in the early 1990s; now there are more than a hundred, many of which buy wines solely for export under labels that South African wine-lovers would not recognize.
Many such merchants are fairly small, of course, and none is anywhere near as large as Distell, which accounts for up to a third of all South Africa’s still and sparkling wine production. Distell was the result of a merger in 2000 of Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery and Distillers Corporation. They had, in fact, been united for some years as Cape Wines and Distillers until 1988, when government decreed their separation; in 2000 there was no opposition from the Competition Board to the merger. And in fact the improvement in some of the well-known brands offered by Distell has paralleled the country’s general improvement, with labels like Nederburg and Fleur du Cap offering excellent quality at different levels. Distell does own some vineyards and crushes some of its own and bought-in grapes, as well as having some joint ventures with important estates; but the great majority of its wine, especially of what it produces for the middle and lower parts of the market, comes from the producing cellars. The wholesalers that crush at least some of their own grapes account for about 7 percent of the total harvest each year.
While the larger producers have increased their penetration of the fine wine market, the sort of wine that is the main concern of this book, which approaches the level of artisanal rather than industrial, comes mostly from the cellars of private producers. Their share of the total crush rose to 17 percent in 2011, but their numbers have grown even more substantially than their share of the crush, from 170 in 1993 to more than 500 by 2011. This is a total that will still seem surprisingly small, however, to someone who knows that the young wine industry of Washington state, for example, has many more wineries than this, despite a much smaller area under vine. The discrepancy is explained partly by the average price reached per bottle of wine and partly by the presence of many more wealthy people in and near Washington to buy the wine and—at a different level of wealth perhaps—to invest in wineries. It seems inevitable that the number of “lifestyle” farmers in the United States would be much greater than here—though certainly some of the new wineries and estates in the Cape have been established by wealthy outsiders willing to do what one of them, banker G.T. Ferreira of Tokara, self-deprecatingly described as seeking “return on ego” rather than “return on investment.”
Furthermore, of course, the cooperative tradition in South Africa is a drag on the number of grape-crushing facilities. Although the number of grape farmers has declined in recent years, largely because of consolidation in tough economic times, there are more than 3,500 of them—many more than in Washington state. A minuscule proportion of these grape farmers has either converted entirely to producing their own wine or has started diverting some of their grapes—sometimes from their best vineyard blocks, separately farmed for quality rather than quantity—into bottles under their own labels. That would account for some of the rise in the number of private wineries. Many of these producers are small, though few are as tiny as Bein, which makes good Merlot off its 2 hectares of vines; and they range up from there. Koopmanskloof (in Stellenbosch, like Bein) has 520 hectares, while Willie Dreyer harvests more than 1,100 hectares of vines on his four farms in the Swartland and Voor-Paardeberg, most of the grapes going elsewhere for vinification.
THE CHANGING VINEYARD
A more important contribution to the development of South African wine since 1994 than grape farmers being tempted into making wine for their own labels has been the appearance of entirely new wineries. Many of them have planted vines on virgin land—occasionally in the traditional wine lands, but more in new areas that have opened up since the early 1990s. To taste the Berrio Sauvignon Blanc, grown amid the salty bluster of Agulhas, or a Crystallum Pinot Noir from Hemel-en-Aarde, and realize that they were simply not permissible before 1992 adds a bizarre note to the pleasure. That was the year that the KWV abandoned the quota system, freeing would-be winegrowers to spend their money as foolishly as they wished, driven by ambition to make fine wine.
This expansion has been one of the most exciting aspects of the history of South African wine in recent times. There has even been growth as far distant from Stellenbosch as the subtropical province of KwaZulu-Natal. But new vineyards have also usefully extended the range of such well-established areas as Constantia and Stellenbosch. On the other hand, much of the significant change to the vine landscape has come about, first, through better viticultural practices, and second, through replanting. Sometimes the same vineyard has been replanted with a more suitable variety or better combination of variety and rootstock; sometimes an estate has abandoned the vineyards in the rich alluvial soils of a warm valley floor and dragged the vines, as it were, up the lower slopes of the mountains