South Africa - Part III

In the fields

Many of the people we spoke to on our travels were eager to emphasise that their wines were made in the fields, rather than in the wineries. These people are called viticulturalists – the people responsible for growing and harvesting the grapes, and they would say that. Viniculturalists are the wine makers, the blenders, who practice their dark arts behind closed doors. More of them later, but everyone seemed to agree that minimal intervention is a pretty good thing, and that wines should reflect terroir.

Despite it being harvest time, we were fortunate enough to get to talk to quite a few of the growers, who turned out to be a highly idiosyncratic bunch. They were in a flat spin, as the week before, temperatures had risen to 48 degrees and vines were suffering from heat stress and dehydration just as they were approaching harvest.

Vines at Durbanville, suffering in the mid-day fire-pit.

To a man (and they were all men) they each enthused about the miraculous God-given qualities of their soils; the nuggety resiliance of their rootstock; the unique micro-climate that wrapped their fields like a duvet; the extraordinary sponge-like water-retention of their subsoils; the sweet cooling zephyrs blowing in from the sea that helped calm the fevered brow of their baking vines, etc - they were a deeply empassioned lot. If you think we are obsessed with the weather in Britain, you should go a few rounds with these guys, who wander around with one eye squinting at the sun and a wetted finger sticking in the air, testing the breezes. They tend their vines and their grapes like their own children, and have a shared obsession with bugs, infections, pests and interlopers of all kinds.

Fungus - the bogeyman

On the subject of infections, you'll often see rose bushes planted at the end of a row of vines. This is because the rose is apparently more susceptible to mildew than the vine, so when the viticulturalist identifies mildew on the rose, he has advance warning of possible outbreak on the grapes and can spray copper sulphate to protect his fruit. Unfortunately the fruit cannot then be picked for two weeks, so timing can be a bit tricky.

Happy vines giving us a cheery wave.

I took the photograph above from our speeding coach, and you can just about make out the roses planted at the end of the rows of vines. As you might have noticed, yellow hands had been fixed to the tops of vines, which was a bit weird, because they wave at you as you fly past. The hands weren't there to deter birds, as I first thought, but were a work of art, and a very chirpy one at that.

Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc are particularly susceptible to mildew as the bunches are very tight, and for this reason the leaf canopy is pruned in such a way as to encourage as much air circulation as possible.

Densely packed, tight clusters of Pinot Noir grapes, attracting mildew, intently.

Cabernet Sauvignon benefits from loose clusters of grapes and is less susceptible to mildew:

The more relaxed Cab Sauv letting it all hang out, chillin' in the breeze.
Apparently, after making love, they light up a cigarette.

Bug stuff

Mealie bugs are a particular problem in South Africa. They are a tiny little pest about the size of a pinhead and look like white dust around the base of a vine, but they can cause a lot of damage by sucking sap from the roots, in the process killing twigs and leaves. Quite interestingly, they secrete honeydew which ants love to eat, so the ants actively protect mealie bugs from other predators. At the Neetlingshof wine estate, the head viticulturist Professor Ebben Archer cunningly controls mealie bug infestation by targeting the ants that protect them, as ants are easier to deal with. Without their bodyguards, other predators are able to attack the mealie bugs, so there you go – problem solved.

Professor Ebben Archer on the right, Master of the mealie bug. Knows loads of odd stuff.

At the Laibach estate on the slopes of the Simonsberg, they deal with mealie bugs by breeding vast numbers of ladybirds and setting them loose in their vineyards, where they happily tuck into the mealies. So effective is this that they have adopted the ladybird as a logo and display it on their foil caps, and have even named one of their organic wines 'Ladybird'.

You wouldn't want to be a Luddite sparrow

Small birds are particularly irksome pests as they have a passion for grapes and, unchecked, will destroy acres of vines. Niels Verburg, a giant of an Afrikaans, makes the renouned Luddite Shiraz, and he deals with the problem in a typically robust manner by encouraging birds of prey in his vineyards, which attack the small birds.

He has installed tall poles throughout his vines for birds of prey to perch on, and has cut down the gum trees that ring his fields so there is no foliage for the fruit-eating birds to hide in.

Valter, one of the tall Poles employed to stand around the
Luddite vineyards, for hawks to perch on.

Incidentally, the gum tree is a prolific grower and as a consequence of the hard pruning, sends up large numbers of straight shoots, which are used for roofing, broom handles and stakes. When he uses them as stakes to support the vines, Niels rubs them with Sunlight soap (as opposed to Imperial Leather, that is), to deter insects.

Stone-throwing hooligans

Birds, however, pale into insignificance as a pest compared to the problems experienced by Pieter Visser of the Oak Valley estate in the Elgin Valley. Baboons are his nightmare – the troop of baboons, that is, that comes down out of the hills, ravishes his vines, gorges on grapes and vanishes into the night, like a simian SAS.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Pieter once lost two tons of fruit in two days, so he sent a gang of men to scare them away. They threw stones at the baboons, which are ferocious creatures, but the animals retaliated by throwing the stones back at the men, who promptly ran away. Baboon - 1, Man - 0. The baboons are protected, but Pieter chases them away by firing his shotgun into the air (though it occured to me in an uncharitable moment, that occasionally his aim may be off and that he might actually miss the air, as it were). These days, however, the apes recognise the sound of his truck’s engine and scarper when they hear it approaching, though they won’t clear off if any other vehicle approaches.

By all accounts, the Baboon problem in Bordeaux is insignificant by comparison.

South Africa - Part II

The Itinerary

South Africa is a stunningly beautiful country. Our base was the Spier Hotel, a four-star hotel with rooms clustered around private plunge pools. (Click on images to enlarge them.)












The hotel was fabulous - apart from the bar unaccountably closing at midnight, often just as we were getting back from some assignation or other. After hours tasting dense thickets of Pinotage and Shiraz, you need cold lager to ungum the tongue, so our shepherdess Jo Mason was often called on to negotiate the unlocking of the beer fridges.

Our first tasting, the afternoon we arrived, involved a wine cruise and buffet on the catamaran Setsea off the coast of Cape Town.

Let’s be honest, there are worse ways to earn a living. It was the perfect antidote to the horrors of the flight, and spirits lifted immediately.

The wine estates we visited were quite something. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are 18,000 word's worth:

Our first tasting on terra firma, in the courtyard of the Waterford Estate

Our second water-bourne tasting, on a riverboat in the Robertson Wine Region

Tasting under the trees at the appropriatly named Fairview estate

The original Dutch colonial house at the ultra-modern Nederburg Estate in Paarl.
This was speed-tasting, covering 35 wines in about 7 minutes, or so it seemed.

The stunning uber-contemporary Vergelen winery

This is part of the 360ºdegree view from the terrace of the winery.
Not at all unpleasant.

In the blasting mid-day sun, it was under the trees for further tastings and buffet lunch with Paul Clever wines

The gorgeous grounds of the Grande Provence estate

First tasting of the day - 9.45 am at Grande Provence

At Boschendal Manor House with DGB - Champagne, Fois Gras, oysters and classical music
on the lawn. Hail storms in the UK.....

Lunch and tasting at Boschendal Manor, one of Cecil Rhodes' properties. Floods in the UK....

Evening Pinotage tasting and braii hosted by Laibach winery...

After a few more Pinotages, the evening mellows out

Sunset over Table mountain from the Laibach terrace, overlooking their lakes
into which we fired golf balls for an hour or so

The morning of the flight home offered another splendid opportunity for a tasting, at the De Grendel facility, Durbanville, overlooking Cape Town

The De Grendel winery. Not too shabby, all in all

When they say Sauvignon Blanc makes a good breakfast wine, they weren't kidding.

As you can see, there are some really magical wine properties in South Africa. The next posting is about South African viticulture, and the strange things they sometimes get up to.....

South Africa wine trip as guests of WOSA - Part I

I’m not quite sure how we wangled it, but on Sunday 28th January, at 9 o’clock in the morning, Graham Price and I stumbled off flight BA059 into the blinding light and dusty heat of a cloudless Cape Town morning.

The flight had been pretty awful – well, completely dreadful, to be honest. I was suffering from an evil back, and the guy in the seat in front of me was a horse of a man who needed every inch of room he could get, which basically meant intruding his seat-back into my personal space. This meant I was no longer able to sit straight in my chair – so I intruded, legs akimbo, into the space of the person on my right (the guy to my left had legs eleven feet long and problems all of his own). She in turn put her seat back down to get more room, which intruded into the space of the rather large chap behind her…and so it went on, domino style, all the way to the back.

Flight BA 059 to Cape Town

As it turned out, the grizzly British Airways flight out was the low point of the wine-tasting marathon organised by Wines of South Africa, the marketing arm of the wine producers in that extraordinary place. We tasted morning, noon and night for a week – total immersion.

There were twenty battle-hardened pro’s on the trip from different branches of the business, which made for illuminating exchanges. We had hoteliers, a brewery chain, a brace of wine consultants, restaurant groups, pub groups, Master Sommeliers from the Dorchester and Gordon Ramsey Group, a wine journalist, and a Master of Wine who was also a hotelier with a small pub group – loads of different bases were covered, and nobody was exactly shy.

The group at 9.30am.

After a couple of substantial tastings....with two more to go.

All work, no play. "I have a feeling I'm going to regret this...", said Paul.

We tasted wines from some 130 producers and were able to speak to the growers and blenders in person. It was plain, from the off, that the trip hadn’t been set up as a wine-buying tour – many of the wines we tasted weren’t available in the UK, or had already sold out, or were experimental tank samples, or the producers didn’t have UK agents at all. Frequently it was a struggle getting UK prices – many hadn’t considered the question, and the nearest indication we could get was the cellar door price in SA.

Rather, the aim of the trip was to give us insights into what was happening with SA wine. They are painfully aware that, in the UK anyway (and we are their largest market), people generally associate South Africa with Pinotage and Chenin Blanc, and that in the past the Pinotage we’ve been getting hasn't been brilliant. As Jason, the Diamond Geezer Master Sommelier from the Dorchester put it, “Life’s too short to drink Pinotage”. Chenin Blanc and Pinotage are, at best, niche wines, but South Africa produces some 50% of the world's Chenin Blanc and just about 100% of the world’s Pinotage, making them big fish in a somewhat shallow and stony pond.

A large Pinotage fish in the shallows, being
loved-up by a Chenin Blanc

On the evidence of the various wines we tasted, it was clear that producers were keen to introduce us to a wider landscape - we were shown 18 Chenins and 20 Pinotages, but were shown 47 Sauvignon Blancs, 30 Chardonnays, 37 Shirazs and over 50 blended wines in the style of Bordeaux or Rhone, which offered a tempting European route away from the New World single varietal thing.

What came across strongly was that South African producers were searching for their own personal hook on which to hang their pyjamas – although their vineyards go back over 300 years, they have only been operating as fully-fledged international wine exporters for some twelve years, since the arrival of democracy. And as they themselves explained, they're busy determining their identity and exploring how they can differentiate themselves from other New World countries. On the evidence of the wine in the glass, there are loads of interesting things happening.

But more of that later....