Craft masters find a distinctive voice at midsize estates

The top wines produced in the cellars of the big wholesale merchants are hard to fault. Their winemakers have access to the best fruit, the best viticultural support and the best technology. If they want to make something to rival the flagship wine of a midsize or even boutique cellar, they are unlikely to be constrained by any of the obvious limitations.

If their winery processes 40,000-50,000 tonnes and their objective is a showstopper available in minuscule quantities, it’s the easiest thing to redirect five tonnes of grapes.

They have access to the best barrels, an on-site laboratory and an army of assistants to do the handcrafting. If their wines lack for anything, it might be personality — lost to high-gloss polish.

Go one step down, to midsize estate cellars, and producers are able to imbue what they make with the stamp of their own aesthetic vision. This was made abundantly clear at a lineup of wines produced at De Grendel, Buitenverwachting, Dewetshof and The Drift. Every one cohered to the established image of the property and clearly reflected the aesthetic of the winemaker.

De Grendel’s Charles Hopkins has been the industry’s go-to expert on sauvignon blanc for many years. His style is characterised by precision and purity — tight, crisp, structured. His latest Koetshuis bears the unmistakable stamp of this vision.

It’s zesty and fresh but without underripe green notes. The palate has been filled out with a small percentage of barrel-fermented semillon, as well as a wood-aged sauvignon component. The oak isn’t so much a flavourant as a contributor to the overall texture of the wine.

The Buitenverwachting 2020 Sauvignon Blanc offers a completely different take on the same cultivar — a function both of the location of the vineyards and how the vinification is approached. Brad Paton has been responsible for the wines of the Constantia property for more than 15 years, so he too has had enough time to optimise the potential of his fruit. He prefers a steely, almost flinty, style freshened up with hints of lime and the vaguest promise of a tropical, almost passion fruit aromatic.

The same winemaker and house style are evident in the wines from the Dewetshof cellar — though the winemaking has passed from father to son (very gradually) over several years. The Bateleur, the estate’s flagship wine, unsurprisingly was the standout example: the original 1987 vineyard still supplies the heart of the wine, contributing concentration rather than juiciness to the palate. However, what defines this — and all the estate’s other wines — is the emphasis on purity rather than funkiness, a tradition that probably dates back to Danie de Wet’s training at Geisenheim, Germany.

The Drift Estate’s wines were always going to be the easiest to attach to the personality of the proprietor. It is by far the smallest of the four properties, which means that site makes a more visible contribution to the aesthetic. When the person imposing that vision is the larger-than-life Bruce Jack, it’s not complicated to identify how it all works.

Jack is a modern version of a 19th-century literary Romantic. He responds to the challenges he sets himself the way a poet writing a sonnet rises above the limitations imposed by the form of the poem.

This is most evident in his 2016 Moveable Feast, in which his self-imposed challenge is to include all the estate’s red varieties in the blend.

This is nothing if you are a winemaker in Bordeaux where the six authorised cultivars are intrinsically complementary. It’s vastly different when you need to marry shiraz, touriga, malbec and tannat, all with some weight (and some with real texture), to the more ethereal pinot noir and the fruity, quite delicate barbera.

That Jack makes it come together so perfectly, starting with aromatic freshness and finishing with complexity and weight, is as much tribute to his vision as to his execution.