MICHAEL FRIDJHON: The rebirth of SA’s brandy industry

Very little in SA escapes the peaks and troughs we who inhabit the southernmost country on the African continent regard as a way of life. We move from boom to bust and back to boom again without the panicked anxiety that afflicts those who live in less fraught places. The fact that the presentation of the national budget was postponed at the last moment without more than the merest ripple of concern in the markets says either that we are made of sterner stuff than our northern hemisphere counterparts or we are too shell-shocked to care.

This is not necessarily true of all sectors of the economy. Fluctuations in fashion play havoc with the way those who are victims of these movements feel about the universe. If, for example, you had been a brandy producer in the heyday of that particular segment of the wine industry, you might now be feeling rightly aggrieved at how trends largely beyond your control have enabled other beverages to erode your prospects.

Thirty or 40 years ago the brandy market in SA totalled about 40-million litres annually — comfortably more than twice the size of the whisky market and at least four times the size of the gin or vodka trade. Its biggest brands alone were bigger than any of these segments — and this was at a time when SA was one of the top 10 markets in the world for Scotch.

To produce that volume of brandy annually, you need to distil about five times that volume of wine. Moreover, even the cheapest bottle of Cape brandy must by law contain 30% pot-distilled spirit. This component must be made in the same way that Cognac is produced in France: doubled-distilled and then aged for a minimum of three years in French oak barrels no larger than 340l.

The sheer scale of all this is almost unimaginable: to barrel-age three years’ worth of the pot-distilled component of all the brandy consumed in SA means that at any one time at least 90% of the nation’s total annual brandy consumption (at cask strength) is ageing in small barrels somewhere in the Western Cape. It’s no surprise that when the fashion changed, it took producers an inordinately long time to respond.

For most of the second half of the 20th century about 140,000 bottles of brandy were consumed every day of the year. When that leviathan started to slow down, the tsunami of stock, storage, staffing — all surplus to demand — nearly flattened everything in sight. Unsurprisingly, it’s taken the wine and brandy industry almost two decades to rejig itself.

Volumes have stabilised at about half of what they used to be. The focus on producing vast quantities of relatively inexpensive alcohol to add octane to Coke has shifted a little towards a more refined world of aged spirit. These premium products are 100% pot-distilled and aged for anything between five and 20 years (longer in general than is required by law in France).

Out of the wreckage of the old volume industry has emerged a smaller, high-value, more sophisticated fine brandy business. It includes many of the established producers as well as a wholly new group of estate wineries. Among the better known names are Van Ryn’s and KWV: both have been in the business for more than century. Each has vast cellars holding blending components maturing in cask for decades. Both offer premium releases with aged statements ranging from 10-20 years (the age of the youngest component in the blend). Oude Molen produces a comparable array.

Among the estate producers, Backsberg, Blaauwklippen, Boplaas, Boschendal, Kaapzicht, Rust en Vrede and Tokara are among the best known. Some offer selections with different age statements, while others follow Cognac nomenclature, assembling blends whose components range from three to 20 years in age. Klippies-en-coke may have given way to vodka and Jagermeister shooters, but with the rediscovery of aged brandy, Bacchus has not been entirely forgotten.

This column originally appeared in Business Day.