Wines from La Vigne Wine Estate

Oswald Sauermann, Diners Club Young Winemaker of the Year 2008

Oswald Sauermann of La Vigne beat all comers to be awarded the title of 2008 Diners Club Young Winemaker of the Year. By Mike Froud.

Been there, seen it, heard it. At La Vigne Wine Estate off the Robertsvlei Road in Franschhoek, they play music to their wines as they mature in barrel! Mostly classical music, typically a different composer every year.

 

And who knows, perhaps it does help to give them an edge. Hard to believe, and an experiment scheduled for next year might satisfy our curiosity. In the meantime, we’re putting the quality down to a good site, good fruit and a pretty hot young winemaker.

At age 27, 2008 Diners Club Young Winemaker of the Year Oswald Sauermann knew he had a good chance of winning the competition with the La Vigne Single Vineyard Shiraz 2007 – despite the fact that it’s made from the first harvest of three-year-old vines. Handpicked grapes from a block of Shiraz grown on red soils on a rocky mountainside, gentle crushing and open fermenters, then malolactic fermentation in barrels before maturing in French as well as Bulgarian (!) and American oak barrels – just 30% new wood, and all the while (17 months) with the music of WA Mozart playing in the cellar. Unfiltered, unfined, tiny quantity (3 500 litres), and boldly priced for a maiden vintage at R185 a bottle ex-cellar.

This is a very labour-intensive red, according to Sauermann. A lot of attention was given to the vines – by way of canopy management, for example – and he “threw off lots of grapes” before taking in the crop of four tons from a vineyard little more than a hectare in size. “The 2007 is more Rhône style. The 2008 will be more New World style. And in the future I’d like to use more French oak, and secondand third-fill only,” he says, not sure as yet what music he’ll be playing…

La Vigne owner Robert Jorgensen is a Norwegian who heads up a group of 11 private schools for young artists in his home country and who now spends six months a year in South Africa – no doubt to escape the Scandanavian winter, but also to pursue his interest in wine, and red wine mainly. He bought the property previously known as Ten Fifty Six when holidaying in Franschhoek a few years ago, and his background as a sound engineer has played a role in the winemaking endeavours at what is a very modest cellar in appearance and off the beaten track.

Until last year, La Vigne’s total production was virtually all sold overseas, mostly in Norway. It’s only now that Sauermann is exploring local avenues of distribution, and, while he tries to interest specialist wine stores to stock the wines, he says he’ll deliver to anywhere in Cape Town and Johannesburg at cellar-door prices (if you order 12 bottles or more).
Visitors to the farm are welcome – you just need to phone ahead to check that the winemaker isn’t busy attending to his vines – and among the Franschhoek restaurants now stocking La Vigne wines are The French Connection , La Bon Vivant  and the Goederust Farm Kitchen.

Back to the music… It’s fairly well accepted that certain types of music can enhance the way a wine tastes, that some wines can taste better (or worse) depending on what music is playing at the time. It’s a fact that sound vibrations can impact on a liquid, with studies having shown how music can change the molecules of water. And as wine comprises more than 80% water, at La Vigne they believe they can change their maturing wines “in a harmonic way” by playing the classics in the barrel cellar 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and very loud – more than 95 decibels – to make sure the wine can “hear” it through the oak staves.

Plenty to be sceptical about, so in 2009 they’ll try maturing a batch to the sound of music played at normal volume, another to very loud music and a third matured in silence. “Then we’ll conduct a blind tasting of these wines,” chuckles Sauermann, who one suspects is more than a little curious himself.