South Africa’s wine superstars — 10 years on

Ten years ago, something very exciting happened on the London wine scene. The wine trade crammed into the concrete basement of a Soho record shop to taste an array of wines from a crowd of about 40 hitherto unknown producers from South Africa. These Cape new-wavers had been assembled by Robin Davis and Damon Quinlan of wine retailer Swig. As Quinlan puts it now, “We’d been increasingly aware for 10 years or more that a new breed of (mostly) young winemakers were making incredible wines, often from lesser-known regions and old vines, that hadn’t until then been recognised for their potential.” They are all winemaking superstars now but back in September 2015 most of them were showing their wines to British palates for the first time.

Two more similar tastings were organised, the third one in 2019 being so popular that Quinlan recalls, “The venue wasn’t big enough for everyone that tried to attend — the first, and possibly last time that a UK trade tasting event had had to operate a ‘one out, one in’ door policy!”

A sense of community is a hallmark of South African winemakers, especially prevalent among these new-wave producers. So when wine buyers Mark Dearing of Justerini & Brooks and UK-based Master of Wine Victoria Mason came up with the idea of doing a 10 Years On blind tasting of their 2015s, they were met with enthusiasm from the South Africans — even if not all could provide 10-year-old bottles.

As a result, 16 of us wine professionals spent a day in May in Berry Bros & Rudd’s well-upholstered cellars tasting blind 78 2015s grouped in 12 suitable flights. The aim was to see whether the wines had aged well — rewarding evolution being recognised as the hallmark of quality in a wine, even if today’s wine drinkers tend to seek more immediate pleasures.

The exercise was a success. The great majority of the wines were still in good shape and the 2015 versions of the ones listed here were downright delicious. Such unexpected disappointments as there were, were generally the result of faulty stoppers. Admittedly, wine professionals tend to be pickier about even mild infections of TCA, the compound associated with mouldy corks, than most consumers but the overall failure rate of 30 per cent would be unacceptable today. Fortunately, wine producers are now much more aware of the need for serious quality control of stoppers (see below).

As usual for South African wine, with the caveat that some corks let the wines down, the whites outshone the reds, with those of Swartland, the hot, dry farmland with myriad old vines well north of the traditional wine centre of Stellenbosch, shining particularly brightly. The region was virtually “discovered” by, and became synonymous with, the new-wave wine producers, although it was old-timer Charles Back of Fairview who first saw Swartland’s potential for fine wine.

Chenin Blanc is the country’s most-planted grape variety and features strongly in its unique Old Vine Project certification scheme. The Swartland Chenin flight and that of white blends, in which Swartland Chenin was often a component, were the two most consistent and exciting of the entire day.

There’s a strong argument that in South Africa there is a much wider range of styles and flavours of Chenin Blanc than there is in its homeland the Loire. The Cape Chenins offered, variously, flavours of honey, green vegetation, hickory smoke and citrus peel as well as the structure of many white burgundies and, in some, a certain fashionable minerality or salinity. Among some thrilling Swartland Chenins, I particularly loved The Liberator Episode 16 Perfectly Flawed which had been aged under flor yeast.

Alex Starey’s single-vineyard Keermont, Riverside was one of two stars of the distinctly variable flight of Stellenbosch Chenins. The other was the Alheits’ Radio Lazarus. All samples of the Alheits’ Magnetic North and Cartology were out of condition — a great shame since recent vintages have been stunning.

As for the white Cape blends, Palladius, a blend of Chenin with 10 other grape varieties from the Sadie Family, was a standout, the 2015 being made one year after Eben Sadie’s very public admission that he had been barking up the wrong tree in trying to make his wines as ripe as possible. (Sadie, pronounced “Sardy”, now joined by his sons, is seen as one of the earliest pioneers of Swartland, as well as a champion of the ancient vines found on mixed farms up the west coast. He is one of very few South African wine producers to have established a real presence, and high prices, in both the UK and US.)

Donovan Rall is an established superstar of Cape wines and his eponymous white blend from several different vineyards was one of the whites that still seemed to have a glorious and complex future ahead of it, as did Marelise Niemann’s Momento blend of Chenin Blanc and Verdelho from Bot River and the Paardeberg.

The other tasters were more taken by the flight of Chardonnays than I was, perhaps because I had participated in a tasting of 22 South African Chardonnays only a few days before and my expectations had been too high. That said, I gave pretty good scores to Crystallum, Clay Shales; Lismore, Estate Reserve; Restless River, Ava Maria; and Storm, Vrede. A significant proportion of these wines, along with the Pinot Noirs, had been grown in the relatively young vineyards of Hemel-en-Aarde in the hinterland of the cool south coast. We can look forward to even greater things in the future presumably.

The final white wine flight, the last of the day, was devoted to Sauvignon Blancs and/or Sémillon. Sémillon was once South Africa’s most-planted grape variety by far and there is still a plot of particularly ancient vines in Franschhoek. Marc Kent of Boekenhoutskloof has long taken advantage of this in his rich-but-snazzy Sémillon bottling which still has another two or three years of life in it, while John and Tasha Seccombe of Thorne & Daughters based their Paper Kite Sémillon 2015 on very similar vines.

Two whites were served open with our buffet lunch because they didn’t fit into any flight. They proved that Chris Williams of The Foundry was already making fine examples of Rhône varieties Roussanne and Viognier in 2015. His Stellenbosch Grenache had been the star of a red flight that morning devoted to “Mediterranean varieties”. The renaissance of Cape Grenache was still in its infancy in 2015 and producers then were still scouting out the best plantings. In the next flight of “Mediterranean red blends”, Sadie’s sophisticated Colomella blend of southern French varieties from Swartland really stood out.

We’d started the day with a flight of Pinot Noirs, a variety that proved the most vulnerable with an extremely high proportion of those shown let down by their closure. Today’s Cape Pinots, most from the Cape South Coast region, are much more impressive, even if it is only recently that South Africa has become a serious Pinot Noir producer.

Syrah of the northern Rhône has been challenging the Pinot Noir of Burgundy as the South Coast’s signature red-wine grape. Sam O’Keefe’s Lismore, Reserve and all three wines from Master of Wine Richard Kershaw, identified by the codes of their clones, were tremendous. The Stellenbosch Syrahs were more variable than those from the cooler South Coast but there was a humdinger from DeMorgenzon.

But it was Swartland Syrah that was the red-wine star performer, with outstanding wines from Porseleinberg and Mullineux. Kudos to Marc Kent of Boekenhoutskloof in Franschhoek for putting Callie Louw in charge of his Porseleinberg offshoot in Swartland.

The reds from Bordeaux varieties were not as thrilling though the three from Boekenhoutskloof stood out. One grape was very obviously missing from this reprise of a revolution: South Africa’s unique Pinotage. But it was presumably regarded by most of these revolutionaries as irredeemably old school.

Jancis Robinson will be speaking at the FT Weekend Festival on September 6 2025 at Kenwood House Gardens, London. For passes go to: ft.com/festival