Mooiplaas Estate in Stellenbosch
Mooiplaas Estate's Winning Wine
Following a 4 Star rating last year for Mooiplaas Estate’s unwooded Chenin Blanc 2006, Louis and Tielman Roos have triumphed this year with their top-rated 2008 vintage. Mike Froud reports on the winners of the 2009 SurePure Chenin Blanc Challenge.
This isn’t one of the glitzy Stellenbosch wine farms, but that’s half the beauty of it. No grand entrance even – in fact the signposting is modest in the extreme. Heading west along the Bottelary Road (M23), just before the winelands give way to the residential, commercial and industrial sprawls of Brackenfell and Kuils River, the service road south to Mooiplaas via Kaapzicht is easy to miss if you’re travelling at speed. It’s a narrow, uneven brick driveway on which you’re obliged to give way to trucks and tractors teetering along in the opposite direction, and it becomes a dirt strip as you approach the vineyards and winery of the Rooses’ estate and glimpse the Mooiplaas nature reserve on the Bottelary Hills.
A mooi plaas (beautiful farm) as they called it in Afrikaans, this family outfit is traditional in feel yet more modern in approach. You’ve got to experience it yourself to fully appreciate what winemaker Louis Roos and viticulturist brother Tielman describe as the “rustic” element. “This is not a manicured place,” says Tielman, although the gardens to the side of the gravel car-park, in front of the tasting room, offices and houses, are pretty enough. “We love the quiet here. You can hear the birds,” he enthuses as the resident bull mastiff , Sebastian, trundles across the lawn. Get Tielman talking about the land and he oozes pride in the nature conservancy on the hill, a special biodiversity that he’s adamant plays a role and comes through in their wines, at least to some degree.
Old and New
Some 25km from the town of Stellenbosch by road yet just 6km from the historic Dorp Street as the crow flies, Mooiplaas’s neighbours include Fort Simon to the east and, just over the hill south and south-west of the watershed, Jordan and Zevenwacht. These are all much more recent enterprises relative to the Rooses’ place, which has a history dating back to 1806 when Jan Bosman was the first owner of the property that, during the 1700s, was part of a huge landholding stretching across the valley to Hazendal and beyond.
The tasting room is where there was once a kraal and then stables for quite a different breed of steeds that one might see a Roos riding across Mooiplaas on a fine day. A hundred years ago, large work horses would have been kept here overnight after a day in the fields. Today you’ll find an interesting set-up where the feeding troughs have been converted into wine display counters-cum-tables at which visitors are told about the place before sipping from the range and purchasing their favourites. Nowhere else is there anything quite like this showroom, where you might also buy some olives or one of the hand-crafted serving trays and other items made by staff from French oak barrels after they have done their time in the cellar.
You can ask to see the cellar but they’re hesitant to show it – it’s not intended for guests, and too cramped to accommodate tours. It also has stories to tell, though, with cement tanks built in 1946 and, among the casks of maturing wine, five barrels of the Rooses’ first Pinot Noir – “something that we’ll be getting our new wine club off the ground with,” smiles Louis, elaborating on how he and the family prefer personal interaction with their customers relative to media campaigns. The seasonal Langtafel (long table) lunches where 30 or so Mooiplaas lovers are entertained by half a dozen or so Roos family members have proved very successful in building relationships.
The friends they make here become “disciples of the cellar”, as Louis puts it, contemplating another round of them in the manor house after the harvest perhaps. “And now we’re able to begin the occasion with sabrage,” he relates – the first Cap Classique bubbly from Mooiplaas was released recently, the non-vintage Duel Brut bearing a label that features a painting of two women sword-fighting, and the Rooses even have a sword once used by a British cavalry officer to do it right and proper when lopping the tops off the bottles…
A Family Affair
The manor house is Cape Dutch, a national monument circa 1833 and, since 1963, the home of Nicolaas and Mercia Roos, Louis and Tielman’s parents who are related to the famous Paul Roos of two generations back… Louis and Tielman’s nephew, Dirk Roos, handles the Mooiplaas marketing and is the great-great-grandson of Paul Roos, the man who played prop for and captained the country’s rugby team back in 1906. In fact, he’s credited with having come up with the Springboks as the name for the national squad, and no doubt this was as much a factor as his successful career as a school principal when the top boys’ high school in Stellenbosch was renamed Paul Roos Gimnasium in his honour.
Arguably the most famous member of the Roos clan these days is Illse Roos, an actress whom many sitcom fans would recognise for her role in the television series Egoli. That said, who knows how many will be talking more about the farm’s winemaking duo following their victory in the SurePure-sponsored Chenin Blanc Challenge, a success story stemming from one of the oldest among the higher vineyards on the estate, yet which has only been four years in the making, so to speak…
Actually, the Chenin Blanc bush vines that bore the grapes for the winning wine are 36 years old and have long been attractive to other wine producers. Mooiplaas didn’t make any wine of its own until 1995 and even today Louis and Tielman keep just 20% of what they harvest for bottling under their own labels. Their reputation as leading Bottelary vintners has been built largely on good Sauvignon Blanc and red wines, with 2005 being the first vintage of Chenin introduced to their portfolio. The 2006, described as a late developer, was rated 4 Stars in WINE magazine a year ago before the 2008 top-scored with 4½ Stars in the 2009 Chenin Blanc Challenge.
Dedication and Consistency
It’s not often that an unwooded Chenin wins the Challenge, though, as Louis points out, they have always tried to be serious with the Mooiplaas version. Full and ripe, “a palate wine involving three to four months lees contact” during fermentation and with a lid on the alcohol, around 14% and possibly lower in future. And, of course, it’s from a good source: at an altitude of 200m, the vineyard from which the Mooiplaas Bush Vines Chenin comes has good soils with significant weathered clay content. And it’s surrounded by blocks of Sauvignon Blanc and Merlot, other varieties that Mooiplaas plants on its cooler sites that benefit most from the southwesterly winds that funnel through from False Bay and Constantia, over the Bottelary Hills and on to Durbanville.
“We try to get consistency,” says Tielman. “Thirty percent of the shoots are removed before the harvest, and we take in just seven tons a hectare.” Quantity is small: only 12 000 bottles of the 2008. But good to know that it’s readily available: January ’09 was the scheduled release date. And what a good price for a champion wine: R37.50 a bottle ex-cellar from 1 February, (around R40 in the trade). The Roos brothers are conscious of the lingering perception among many that Chenin Blanc is cheaper than Sauvignon Blanc, for example, and should be priced as such. Mooiplaas sells three to four times as much Sauvignon as it does Chenin and for quite a bit more per bottle. However, things are set to change...
From the 2009 harvest will come two Chenins from Mooiplaas. One will be more premium, more exclusive. A small pocket will be wooded, single-vineyard wine is the thinking, and Louis has the name of the vineyard Houmoed (keep faith) in mind for a label that we might get to see sometime in 2010. Surprisingly, the Rooses currently have little on sale at the farm for over R100 a bottle – the range extending from cheap and cheerful Langtafel white and red to the Rosalind red blend (R101 a bottle) and Duel Cap Classique (R120) at the the top end of the price spectrum.
So, quite a bit that’s new, reports of Mooiplaas wines having been among the top 12 in terms of sales at the WineX festival last year, and 2009 off to a cracking start with another award won. Popular winners, then, and not much standing still at this farm in Bottelary.
