State of Estates
Neil Pendock considers the estate concept and finds it falls between two stools labeled "single vineyard wines" and "Wine of Origin Western Cape." While Hendrik Boom was picking his maiden harvest in the VOC garden in Cape Town back in 1659 - "Muscadel and other white round grapes, very fragrant and tasty" according to his commander, Jan van Riebeeck - over in France, an extremely fat Louis XIV was dining in customary fashion at Versailles.
A royal role-model for Mr Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, the Sun King would consume vast quantities of food. He ate with his fingers, mouth open, talking all the while, and doffing the hat he always wore at table to lady diners, with the brim consequently dripping grease and scraps of food. Just one banquet, the year Boom's vines were planted, featured 16 hot hors d'oeuvres, 14 patés, 10 soups, a dozen different fish dishes, 16 of meat, 16 veg, 32 salads, a dozen game pies and two dozen cakes.
L'etat c'est moi ("the state, that's me", rather than the more accurate "what a state I'm in") was the kind of verbal morsel he'd let slip. It was during his 53 year reign that the first modern cookbook was published (Le Cuisinier Français by La Varenne) and French chefs first embraced gastronomic terroir in the shape of a truffle, giving their custom of over-spicing dishes, the flick.
During Louis' reign, Dom Pérignon invented Champagne. Of course he didn't - Cleopatra was serving Caesar and Mark Anthony wine with a bubble from secondary fermentation, whispering sweet nothings, two millennia ago - but Champagne remains the leading example of how legislated terroir can shut out competitors and advance a quality agenda.
The living patron saint of biodynamic winemaking, Nicolas Joly, calls the whole French appellation system "a stroke of genius". Writing in the Organic Wine Journal he noted the "concept was simple: different locations produce distinctive vintages from grapes with such a special taste that their uniqueness should be legally guaranteed for consumers". A seminal paper, only recently discovered by Decanter magazine. Précised recently on the Decanter website, it has sparked a flood of comment on the bibulous blogs of the world.
Geographic context is the key to terroir and its scale varies. The authors of The Essential Guide to SA Wines - Terroir and Travel, Elmari Swart and Izak Smit, divide SA into two dozen terroir-based "wine pockets" chosen to represent "a level of homogeneity - not only in soils but also in the shape of the landscape, climatic influences and cultivation of wine grapes".
Sticking with the theme of pockets, a secondary consideration was that "all selected wineries were given the opportunity to sponsor a dedicated profile detailing their uniqueness". This trousering algorithm seems to have sometimes outweighed nature, with the entire Northern Cape stuffed into a single pocket!
Which is a bit of a stretch, when individual koppies have unique biomes of sifkoppe, hondepisbosse and haasballetjies, as botanist Jan Vlok will entertainingly confirm - not to mention the major differences between the Plettenberg Bay and Langeberg Garcia Districts, which were recently registered.
Like snowflakes and coastlines, terroir is essentially a fractal property of nature - a phenomenon that appears similar at different levels of magnification. Think of Google Earth and start with a Nasa-eye view of the planet with two primeval wine continents called Old and New World. Inhabitants of the New World region worship at the altar of ripe fruit while on the other side of the world, Oldies pray to their ancestors.
Hit the zoom-in button and a wine producing country rushes into view. National wine character is a reality - on a marketing, if not always a tasteable level. Think of those clichéd grassy Sauvignons Blanc from New Zealand, sunshine-in-a-bottle, well-oaked Chardonnays from Australia, exotic Cabernets from Chile.
Continue zooming in and appellations start to fill the screen, fragmenting into wards, then individual producers from the largest co-op to tiny boutique wineries; next appear single vineyards, then individual plants, all the way down to single berries. Each exhibits terroir, albeit at a different fractal scale.
The finest resolution of terroir achieved to date in South Africa is the 8-Rows Sauvignon Blanc from Diemersdal, made from the coolest eight rows of vines in a single Durbanville vineyard. The naming of single vineyards was long resisted by the grey-shoed apparatchiks of SA wine legislation. Like so many King Canutes, they tried in vain to hold back the marketing sea, arguing that the estate concept was sufficient to guarantee tasteable terroir. When the tide eventually rushed in, it deposited 166 shiny new single vineyards onto the statute books.
"They're more of a marketing gimmick than anything else," comments Johann Krige, owner of Kanonkop and a leading light in the Estate Producers Association. "Wines grown, made and bottled on a single contiguous property - i.e. the estate concept - makes more sense. But a brand like Kanonkop is a different thing. I can now use my brand for bought-in grapes or wine. Personally I think the Kanonkop brand is too valuable to use for bought-in grapes or wine. 'Kadette', however, is another issue - that is why I've positioned it as a second label."
South Africa has 129 registered estates which differ in size between single vineyards and demarcated appellations. Stellenbosch has the lion's share (48) followed by Paarl (27) and Robertson with 19. Krige flags an upcoming battle with the Wine & Spirit Board as some registered estates have non-contiguous vineyards from which they make estate wine. "You can't be half pregnant," he observes. "These producers should only be allowed to make estate wine from the piece with the cellar on it."
While Krige admits "not one farm in SA was set out according to terroir", an estate is a sensible logistic unit of terroir (or SLUT, as opposed to pocket or NUT, natural unit of terroir defined on a purely botanical basis) as it typically has a single winemaker. And of the four components that comprise the terroir - soil, climate, aspect and man - to paraphrase St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, the greatest of these is Man.
The decision when to harvest is crucial: too early and it's green tannins, puckered lips and high acids all round. Too late and it's jammy fruit and moron-strength alcohols. Then there's the role of wood and the toasting thereof.
Harvest date and winemaking strategies are all first order effects that often swamp second and third order factors like soil and vineyard aspect traditionally thought of in terms of terroir. And in the production unit called an estate, these external factors are typically under centralized control. The only real question left is where the grapes were grown, which in the era of commercial agriculture, depending on a widespread use of pesticides and fertilizer, is perversely one of the least important variables in the equation, assuming a reasonable level of quality is achieved.
This counter-intuitive behaviour is confirmed by the performance of so-called commercial wines in blind tastings: for example, two golds for Drostdy-Hof at this year's Concours Mondial and ditto for Fleur du Cap at the International Wine Challenge. Confirmation of Joly's point that "technological tastes can be reproduced anywhere on the planet. In other words, you can find the same taste at a fifth or a tenth of the price".
Joly has his sights set impossibly high: "the taste of wine - its harmony, its beauty, its elegance - belongs to the qualitative world of intangible origin," something the commercially farmed virus-infected vineyards of SA [and elsewhere] are generations away from delivering. Besides, as UK wine critic Robert Joseph pointed out at this year's Swiss International Airlines Wine Awards in Cape Town, "you have to be selling a product people want to buy, rather than making something you want to sell". Is the public ready for SA terroir-driven wine and, more importantly, prepared to pay for it?
Louis XIV was right about one thing: when it comes to the state, the King is the thing. And with wine estates, it looks like the same rule applies.
In a nutshell:
An estate wine can only be made from grapes grown and vinified on a particular piece of land.
In July 2003 the wine of origin legislation was amended to allow estate producers to buy in grapes or wine from elsewhere. However, the resultant wine may not be proclaimed an estate wine. And if the grape area of origin differed, this needed to be reflected.
So Pinotage grown and vinified on the Kanonkop property can appear under the Kanonkop estate label. However, Kadette simply appears under a Kanonkop label without any estate attribution - and, should the grapes have been sourced in Paarl for example, the area of origin would have to reflect "Wine of Origin: Coastal" rather than "Wine of Origin: Stellenbosch".
