Lukas van Loggerenberg launched his eponymous wine brand in 2016 — not the most auspicious vintage for a new wine enterprise, though also not catastrophic.
It was a small beginning, about 500 dozen bottles, the way things have to be when you are finding your way in the commerce of wine. The costs pile up at the beginning: grape purchases, cellar rental, tanks and barrels, and then bottles, capsules and boxes. A year later (at the earliest) you might see sales (but no income — the trade takes its time to make payments).
Before there’s any money in the bank, your costs for the next vintage are on you. If you’re lucky, you sell enough in the next 12 months to free up some money for the grape purchases in the third year. However, your business needs to grow, so the costs you pay in year three should be for more fruit than you financed in year one: it’s a treadmill on Mount Sisyphus, and even with growing success the pressures of funding don’t really go away. All you have is a more saleable track record for whoever is helping you to finance the enterprise.
Ten vintages later he sells more than 10 times the first year’s production, half in an entry-level brand, Break a Leg, which retails for just less than R200, and the balance in his premium cuvées, which cost R350-R750. So he’s built a proper business in what (in wine industry terms) is very little time. How did he do it? First, by making very good wine. This is a given — with plenty of fine wine available, you can’t get away with anything less. But that’s not the secret to his success; it’s merely a prerequisite.
His pitch is what sets him apart, and it’s worth understanding what it is and why it works. His story — evident in his wines — is low-intervention winemaking: very good grapes, mostly from old vine sites; intelligent viticulture that ensures fruit ripeness at relatively low alcohol levels; careful, almost invisible oaking; and great purity and precision.
His story is low-intervention winemaking: very good grapes, mostly from old vine sites; intelligent viticulture that ensures fruit ripeness at relatively low alcohol levels; careful, almost invisible oaking; and great purity and precision.
Once again — there’s plenty of this about — he walks the talk like it’s a superhighway. There’s a tradition of this in the Cape wine industry. It dates back at least to the late Boland Coetzee; it was raised to an art form by Eben Sadie and Adi Badenhorst, and it’s delivered with Oscar-worthy perfection by Van Loggerenberg.
It’s there in the wine names: “Kamaraderie” (gratitude to all his mates/co-producers who helped to launch him), “Graft” (his Oupa’s life message about how to get on) and “Trust Your Gut” (intuition trumps technology). It’s in the self-effacing modesty about his achievement, in the openness about what might have gone wrong. He lets you know that he feels privileged to be where he is now because he takes no credit for it. It reinforces the minimal interventionist winemaking message: what he is saying is “the wines make themselves” so they are what they are, not what he made them to be.
However they were made, they are mostly splendid. The 2025 Trust Your Gut Chenin (from three different old vine sites) lets the side down: the bottle had been open for some time, and it had not done well. A fresher bottle would have been better. The Kamaraderie more than made up for it — and it had been open as long: great intensity, linearity and salinity.
Both his cinsauts are splendid: the Geronimo is the more fragrant, almost pinot-like in its prettiness, and the Lötter (from a vineyard planted in 1932) is a little more four-square at the moment, built for the long haul. His Breton Cabernet Franc is a bit of an iconic wine (he calls it his “blue-eyed boy”) — tight, textural and with fine powdery tannins. There are two shirazes, of which the best is undoubtedly Graft — almost Cote Rotie-like in its floral spice: all pink peppercorns and violets and a bargain at R750 a bottle compared with a comparable wine from the Northern Rhone.
Business Day
