Farming is not for the hasty, get-rich-quickly kind of person. If that’s who you are, settle for banking or tendering for government projects.
Whether you’re producing sheep, cattle or grapes, not much changes on a farm within a year. Good farmers watch their products through all the seasons, year by year, and select the best each year for the future. Then those are watched carefully, and the best of them are set aside for further improvement.
As the years pass the products of the farm grow better and better.
You can’t hurry the seasons and even with modern technology a year takes 365 days to pass.
This is evident at Vriesenhof, where Jan “Boland” Coetzee has been selecting individual vines for many years.
It’s not good enough, he says, simply to decide Merlot, or Cabernet or whatever, will do well in this particular vineyard. Some individual vines thrive while others struggle to survive heat, wind, viruses and mildew.
Not all Merlots are equal.
Jan takes cuttings from those vines that thrive and grafts them onto rootstocks that have also shown their adaptability.
These baby vines have every chance of producing good healthy, disease-resistant grapes.
Even then, it will be a few years before the new vines come into full production.
This feeling of timelessness is what distinguishes between great vineyards and merely good ones. This is why the great vineyards of France are so famous. It’s taken them centuries to get where they are.
It’s no accident that the wines from Vriesenhof score four stars and higher in each year’s Platter Guide.
They’ve earned every one of those red stars by patience and careful, hard work. And time.
And if you’re a buyer of these great wines, don’t rush them. They’re not made for a quick gulp at a disco party. There are hundreds of wines on the market that will serve for that. Vriesenhof wines deserve your full attention.
Try the wonderful ’05 Vriesenhof Kallista blend. It’s a great wine right now, but in three more years it will be stunning.
The ’05 Cabernet takes you back to what a good Cabernet is all about – dry, noble, even a touch austere. There’s nothing juicy or tutti-frutti about it,
But as you sip it, you know you’re tasting greatness.

Photograph: David Biggs, Cabernet, merlot

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Ideally, I think, every winemaker should be striving to produce the very best wine possible from the grapes available to him (or her) and the terroir in which they are produced.

If this were indeed the case, every wine farm and every wine maker would have just one wine to offer. All his effort and all his knowledge would be concentrated into that one, superb wine. It would be unique to that cellar.

Unfortunately life isn’t like that. We have to earn a living and follow what the customers demand, whether we agree with their demands or not.

Which is why almost every Cape cellar offers a Sauvignon Blanc, and a Merlot and a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Chardonnay, even though that farm may not be ideally suited to the production of that particular grape.

And a “Bordeaux Blend.” Oh dear!

Every winemaker seems to feel obliged to produce a red blend based on Cabernet and Merlot like the famous wines of Bordeaux.

I have often said the very idea of making a “Bordeaux Blend” is a loser from the start. The best you can ever achieve is to make something that’s close in style to the wines of Bordeaux.

Always a second-best, or an almost-as-good.

I was fortunate enough to be a member of a tasting panel that assessed 20 “non-Bordeaux blends” recently.

In other words, they were wines blended from any red varietals the winemakers felt would add the most to the end result.

Shiraz, Pinotage, Cabernet, Cinsaut, Mourvedre, Malbec and Ruby Cabernet all featured in the line-up.

The results were spectacular.

Freed of the restraints of trying to copy the style of Bordeaux, our winemakers had created individual, very drinkable wines, full of rich fruit character, beautifully balanced tannins, well handled oak and silky texture.

Wines like Flagstone’s Longitude (Shiraz, Cabernet, Malbec), Beyerskloof’s Synergy (Pinotage, Merlot, Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon) and Schalkenbosch Edenhof Bin 409 (Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvedre, Voignier and Cinsaut) charmed all the panel members.

Some very affordable wines like Boekenhoutskloof The Wolftrap (Shiraz, Mourvedre and Viognier) showed delightful, easy-drinking elegance — perfect for our relaxed South African lifestyle.

Surely these are the sort of wines our cellarmasters should be striving to achieve.

Each is unique, each is original, truly South African and none tries to mimic the ideas of some self-opinionated winemaker far away in an ancient French chateau.

Isn’t it time we became “Proudly South African” rather than “Trying Hard to be French”?

Photo: Cape Winelands, courtesy of TravelBlog

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