MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Wine drinkers spoilt for choice in quality and price

SA is home to a wide range of wine producers, from huge wineries all the way to the equivalent of mom-and-pop businesses selling fewer than 1,000 cases a year. All come with backstories and mythologies, the former offered by way of an explanation for why the brand exists, the latter a combination of rumour and sales pitch, laced with a modicum of truth.

Most of the Cape’s producers occupy the cute and cuddly side of this spectrum. About 40% of the wineries make fewer than 7,000 cases. A further 30% crush enough wine to produce between 7,000 and 35,000 cases, though not all of them bottle their full production. Many sell a proportion in bulk either to local wholesalers or to buyers abroad.

It’s clear that by far the greatest percentage of wine producers are quite small, given that the really big cellars — upwards of 350,000 cases with at least 60% of them producing the equivalent of 700,000 cases — comprise less than 10% of the total. But “quite small” doesn’t have to mean minuscule. At about 10,000 cases, it’s not possible for a producer to pretend that the wines are so rare they have to be sold on allocation.

This in turn means that to sell the full production every year, a sales and marketing effort is actually required. More importantly, a significant percentage of what is produced has to be affordably priced. It’s safe to conclude that it is possible to buy genuinely handcrafted wines without mortgaging the house or selling your soul.

There are obviously a vast number of small to mid-size producers vying for a place on the shelves of wine merchants. Almost all of them have mailing lists and are happy to trade directly with wine enthusiasts. Two whose wines are really worth getting to know are Lukas van Loggerenberg and Trizanne Barnard.

Van Loggerenberg works mainly with vineyards in Stellenbosch, though he sources some fruit from the Swartland and gets fabulous cinsaut from an ancient block in Franschhoek. He rightly enjoys a reputation for his Breton Cabernet Franc, made more in the Loire than the Bordeaux style. Fresh and bright, with lifted aromatics, it delivers pure linear fruit, unmediated by any visible oak influence.

From my recent tasting of his range there were several standout wines. One I particularly liked was his Lotter Cinsaut made from a few rows of vines planted in 1932 in Franschhoek. Extraordinarily concentrated and surprisingly layered, it’s the kind of wine you can drink very easily now — only to regret you never aged it to enjoy on its plateau of maturity. I was also taken with his Graft Syrah from Stellenbosch’s Polkadraai Hills, intense and peppery, and his Kamaraderie Chenin, concentrated, multilayered, flinty and luminously pure.

Barnard is undoubtedly one of the Cape’s finest and most thoughtful winemakers. She brings to her wines that unique and rare combination of technical perfection and aesthetic vision. She is completely confident about the outcome she seeks, so there are no compromises in fruit quality, nor does she allow showiness to provide a distraction from the true form and nature of the finished wine.

All of her 2023 Seascape range wines are worth tracking down. The Elim Blanc Fumé was for me the standout bottle on the day: fabulously aromatic, with whiffs of blackcurrant leaf to go with lime blossom and mown hay, it’s completely extraordinary. My shopping list would also include the Benede-Duivenhoksrivier Chardonnay — already perfumed and complete, a delicious and utterly seductive wine for the first day of spring. I would add to that her latest Elim Syrah, early-picked and on point, with hints of peppery spice mingling with hints of nori.

All her wines can be enjoyed now, all will certainly age well in bottle. The two definitely worth the deferred gratification are the Sondagskloof white (50% sémillon, 50% sauvignon blanc) and the Hemel-en-Aarde Barbera: meaty and yet juicy — it’s the kind of wine Piedmontese producers should use to benchmark their own efforts.