Young and old vines in new wave

For most of the 20th century the Swartland, the region now so important to “new wave” Cape wine, was a bulk wine source for wholesalers.

In the late 1990s a joint venture between Charles Back (Fairview), Gyles Webb (Thelema), John Platter and Jabulani Ntshangase became the catalyst for change. Called Spice Route, with its original brand home and cellar near Malmesbury, it brought a fine wine operation to what had up to then been co-op wine space.

The partners appointed as the route’s cellarmaster young graduate winemaker Eben Sadie. After a few years he moved on and created his Swartland-based business, which became the poster boy for authentic artisanal winemaking in the Cape. This coincided with SA needing desperately to break with the industrial image that years of subservience to the KWV model had inevitably cultivated.

Sadie worked with viticulturist Rosa Kruger, scouting out and producing wines from some of the least recognised (and least appreciated) old vineyard blocks in the country. He established a model that served as the blueprint and inspiration for the next generation of landless winemakers to build on. Almost all of the important players in small-volume, singlesite wine production in the Cape today acknowledge their debt to Sadie.

There is therefore a direct line from Spice Route to Sadie to the Mullineuxs, who began their winemaking careers at Tulbagh Mountain Vineyards before launching their own enterprise in 2007. Their focus was also older vineyard blocks, their cultivars of choice those that were in good supply in the Swartland: syrah and chenin.

A decade later their most famous wines still depend on both, with the top syrah cuvées from single sites (and marketed with reference to their specific soil types) and the chenin a key component in a white blend that draws on other heirloom cultivars in the Swartland.

I was recently privileged to taste a 10-year vertical of the Mullineux white blend. Looking at the wines alongside each other it is possible to identify the coherence of the winemaker’s aesthetic vision in the mature (and maturing) wines, while tracking vintage variation and the role played by other old vine components (clairette and semillon gris) introduced more recently. Within a day I attended another vertical — five different vintages spread over 10 years — of Sadie’s Palladius white blend. Again, what united the wines was the aesthetic vision of the creator: selecting the building blocks in sometimes different proportions in order to arrive at a final and coherent whole.

Finally I had the chance of tasting several vintages of a completely different Swartland wine – one of the few new estate ventures in the appellation. About 10 years ago Marc Kent of Boekenhoutskloof acquired Porseleinberg, which included some old shiraz vines that had once contributed to Sadie’s Columella. While Kent retained what he could of the old vines (they supplied all the Porseleinberg fruit from 2010 to 2012) he began a major replanting programme.

Callie Louw, who has been responsible for the vineyards and cellar since the inception, shares with Sadie and the Mullineuxs an aversion to interventionist winemaking. Except for varying the percentage of his crop that is vinified in large oak foudre and concrete eggs, and the ratio of new to old vines, vintage variation means exactly that.

Still, you cannot dismiss the role of the younger vineyards – they now account for about 75% of what goes into the bottle. With the latest release (the 2016) comfortably my best wine in a recent line-up of every vintage produced (and possibly the highest-scoring current release on my website), it’s living proof that the Swartland is not only about old vines.