Who can doubt that summer is properly on us, so wine consumption has shifted to crisper, fresher whites. It’s easy to see why: in warmer weather these seem more attractive than full-bodied reds. This is the moment for which the Cape’s sauvignon blanc producers have been (to quote Shakespeare) “standing like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start”.
Not that they’ve had a lean winter — climate change may have made it more of a challenge to produce fine wine from heat-sensitive varieties, but it’s also meant that the demand for bright, unwooded whites extends well beyond summer. There are other reasons for not feeling sorry for the sauvignon brigade: they have the quickest turnaround time and the best cash flow of anyone in the wine business. Thys Louw at Diemersdal brought his first 2025s to market before end-March: even Heineken’s brew-times are longer.
Since then, dozens of 2025 sauvignons have arrived on wine store shelves, adding their presence to the real excitement about the vintage. Early tastings across a number of varieties suggest it’s likely to be one of the best this century. So when Adam Mason, who has just released his new-look Yardstick wines, arrived with a bottle of his 2025 made from fruit sourced in Constantia, I was particularly keen to sample it. Classic wines from classic sites are the true test of the harvest.
I wasn’t disappointed (nor was I with his newly released 2023 pinot and his 2023 syrah — both from Vriesenhof/Talana Hill vineyards, both intriguing, both not made for frivolous drinking). The 2025 Yardstick sauvignon is completely ripe, yet still fine, stony, saline and pure. This is no easy tightrope to walk. The fruit has to ripen past the green pepper/capsicum spectrum without losing its edge; it mustn’t be flimsy, but it also mustn’t show even a hint of middle-age spread.
I recently presented a line-up of some of the best regional examples of sauvignon blanc at a tutored tasting at Cape Wine. Two — both from indisputably cooler sites (Strandveld Pofadderbos 2021 and Iona Elgin Highlands 2022) — were ageing beautifully, easily dispensing with the myth that sauvignon should be consumed young.
The Strandveld is from a single site in Elim planted in 2003. The Iona was sourced from several blocks ranging in age from 10-25 years. Like the Yardstick, they were quite low in alcohol, yet the fruit had advanced past the jarring herbaceous stage. When the site delivers luminous wine perfectly structured for freshness and longevity, you know your vineyards are in the right place.
This was equally evident at the launch of the latest vintage of Steenberg’s Magna Carta. The wine, created as the Constantia expression of a white Bordeaux blend (so sauvignon married with semillon), has always been pitched at ultrapremium white wine consumers who understand that it’s not intended for early consumption. Unlike many deluxe reds, which offer plenty of primary fruit for impatient oligarchs, young, cool-climate semillon-sauvignon blanc can be almost fetal in its absence of personality.
Magna Carta is not produced every year. Elunda Basson, who took over as the cellarmaster at Steenberg in mid-2019, had to wait until 2021 for fruit of the quality she deemed suitable for her top-of-the-range blend to come into the winery. That vintage has recently sold out, and her next release — the 2023 — is now available for sale.
Stylistically, she has made no concessions to accessibility. There is a temptation to “fix” the aphonic silence, the bony austerity, by adding cosmetic layers of toasty new oak, and perhaps leaving a little residual sugar to enhance the texture of the palate. From the first whiff of the newly released wine, it is clear she has resisted these options.
Instead there’s an almost ghostly presence, an emerging statement of vinous integrity. Steely and pure, uncompromising and intense, not yet fully formed, but rippling with promise. Magna Carta 2023 is a tightly wound clock spring, charged with potential, “a greyhound in the slips”.
This article was first published in Business Day.
