MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Cellar tours can help separate fact from PR spin

Aficionados of cellar tours, the enthusiasts and the professionals who believe that by seeing the heart of the wine factory they will better understand the flavour profile of what lands up in the bottle are no more peculiar a species than, say, safari junkies. The bored tourist who says “when you’ve seen one lion you’ve seem them all” could well be the avatar of the Australian wine writer who once urged me to “take one for the team” and accompany the guide to see yet another bottling line while he feigned illness.

Both are correct: in appearance all lions are the same, just as all stainless steel (or oak or concrete) fermenters are the same. Nor is “my oak is better than your oak” an argument automatically resolved by looking at barrels, or foudre: the proof of this particular smoothie is in the drinking. Those of us who persist in undertaking these in-depth visits (in my case especially to vineyards and wineries though also to see lions and cheetahs) are motivated by our own personal priorities.

Sometimes they are unavoidable — the vinous equivalent of seeing a friend’s newly refitted kitchen. Politeness obliges you to say “yes” to the invitation. (You hope that an unexpected discovery will reward your good manners). Sometimes you want to test the authenticity of the PR blurb: when the marketing message tells you the wines are aged in new oak, you want to see and count the casks. A large facility producing, say, 20,000 cases of red wine would need to have space for at least 500 barrels. Sometimes you just need to get a feel of the culture of a place, the way the staff interact, their mutual respect and understanding. And, of course, there is the matter of the vineyards, assuming the grapes are estate grown.

I spent a few days just after the end of this year’s harvest sampling the new ferments and hearing what the winemakers were saying about 2025 (they are all pretty enthusiastic — and rightly so). A quick vineyard visit with Matt Day at Klein Constantia showed just how different each vineyard block can be: two adjacent sauvignon sites — separated by a 10m service path, the one facing more to the south, the other more to the east, ripened five weeks apart. Nothing better illustrates the importance of site.

At Tokara we needed an off-road vehicle to access the slopes from which the property’s best cabernet grapes are harvested. We were there just after the equinox, and towards sunset, so it was possible to track how the site enabled the vines to optimise sunlight over the course of the day. At the same time, the steep gradient and the more southerly aspect had shielded the fruit from more direct and therefore more intense heat.

But it was at Vergelegen that winemaker Luke O’Cuinneagain showed me levels of geeky detail that I had never before encountered with such clarity: wines made from the same block of vineyard, but separated by clone; wines from the same clone, fermented in barrels of the same age, but sourced from different French coopers. Perhaps, most amazingly, wines from the same site, ageing in barrels from the same cooper, but where the oak was sourced from parts of the same forest where the soils were completely different.

So just as we recognise the importance of the growing environment of the vine, it turns out (unsurprisingly on reflection) that the same rule applies to trees. Oaks grown on sandy soils make barrels that impart different characteristics compared with oaks rooted in shale or decomposed granite.

You may ask what this means for the consumer? The more component parts a winemaker can work with, the more complex — and the more seamless — a wine he can assemble. Of course great wine is made in the vineyard. But an orchestra with great musicians, more and better instruments, all under the baton of a great conductor, must in the end produce the best rendition of the symphony.

Business Day