The Darling of the vineyards
ONE OF DARLING CELLARS’ most loyal clients hit the nail on the head when she said, “I love how Darling Cellars managed to completely shake down the image of a cooperative cellar and from this clean break, build one of quality. I don’t understand how, but they did it.”
It is comments like these that make the team at this cellar, nestled among the rolling hills of Darling, very proud, since they have spent the last 14 years trying to do just that. Darling Cellars has come a long way since 1948, when it was established as Mamre Weg Koöperatiewe Kelder, to where it is today, a private cellar focusing on high-quality wines, but always with the goal in mind to offer the consumer great value for money. Today the cellar belongs to just over 20 shareholders and it is managed on the principles of a company.
The overhaul that has been coming since 1996 culminates in the rename of their top tier and a redesign of the labels. What was known as the DC range, will now be called the Darling Cellars Reserve range. The new label features a gnarly old bushvine, and aptly so, since this is one of the undiscovered gems of this cellar – their collection of valuable, unirrigated old bushvine vineyards they make these reserve ranges from. “Not many people know we have access to these old vines,” says marketing manager Danie de Kock. “It’s such a great selling point that we have decided to take it to the label. About 95% of our vines are bushvines and the same percentage isn’t irrigated, so it’s as close as nature intended as we can get it.”
In August 2009, they launched a series of stand-alone products, most notably a Bordeaux blend, a R120-a-bottle value smasher called Sir Charles Henry Darling. Named, of course, after the Governor of the Cape Colony who also lent his name to the village, this wine really shows what Darling terroir can do. It is a blend of Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, all kept to a low production of between four and six tonnes per hectare to ensure concentrate flavours. It was barrel fermented in 100% first-fill French oak for 22 months and bottle aged for a year before it was released. The 2007 vintage is currently for sale. According to winemaker Abé Beukes, this wine shows fine integration of fruit and wood and it can benefit from a few more years bottle maturation.
Two other additions that stand out, are the Blanc de Blanc Cap Classique and the Lime Kilns, a fruit-driven puncher with peaches, citrus and vanilla on the nose. It’s a blend of Chenin Blanc, Viognier and Chardonnay.
The shareholders continue to invest in the cellar with its stateof- the-art equipment and they’ve recently started to replant many of the vineyards to include all the noble cultivars.
