Some of SA’s finest old wines are going on the block
The first recorded wine advice appears in the Bible in Luke 5:39 “No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, ‘The old is better.’” As a rule of thumb, it served mankind well enough for roughly 2,000 years.
Then late in the 20th century the opposite became fashionable — at least in SA. Noone wanted mature wine, and the price of a current release was higher than the shelf price of the previous vintage.
Since then the pendulum has moved back — not all the way, but far enough for there to be a heightened respect for the achievements of the winemakers of the early modern era of Cape wine. This has not been instantaneous: the Old Wine Tastings, which preceded the annual judging of The Trophy Wine Show, created a groundswell, which in time altered perceptions at home and abroad.
In 2011, Neal Martin, then Robert Parker’s palate-for-the-Cape and a Trophy Wine Show judge that year, sampled a 1961 Lanzerac Pinotage and confessed himself blown away.
“If this was the wine being made in the Cape 50 years ago,” he said, “you cannot speak of SA as a ‘New World’ wine country.”
Tastings like these contributed to the creation of an international audience for old Cape wines some time before the domestic market discovered them. But local consumers also read what international critics wrote. When James Molesworth (Wine Spectator USA) raved about an obscure wine called GS Cabernet 1966, and Greg Sherwood MW gave a perfect 100-point score to a 1957 Chateau Libertas, bidders for the rare and unobtainable emerged from the dark corners of their caves.
At this year’s Old Wine Tasting, many of the most memorable wines came from the production cellars of SA’s first modern fine wine merchant, Stellenbosch Farmers Winery (SFW). These included a 1965 Chateau Libertas, a 1969 Lanzerac Pinotage, a 1968 Lanzerac Cabernet and the 1974 Nederburg Auction Cabernet — in my view one of the best wines produced in the Cape in the past 60 years.
While there are not many bottles of these wines about, by far the largest treasure trove is at the old Tabernacle Cellar at the Adam Tas winery, once part of SFW and now part of Distell. Aware of the value of the heritage it holds, Distell has made a series of gamechanging decisions.
First, the SA wines in the Tabernacle will be vetted and recorked — thus giving buyers a guarantee that what is on offer is in age-appropriate condition, and very much worth drinking.
Every bottle is sampled, and levels topped from a bottle sacrificed for this purpose. The finest Amorim corks are sourced for the recorking, and argon gas is used to fill the head space in the bottle, to blanket the wine and protect against further oxidation.
Distell’s second decision has been to undertake to donate the proceeds from the sales of these wines to fund an archival resource (and perhaps a Cape wine museum) to preserve the history of the industry.
The first major sale of the recorked collectibles from the Tabernacle (together with a mixed bag of imports) will take place on July 10 at Strauss & Co. It includes a number of iconic wines including the 1940 Chateau Libertas, several GS cabernets (the last 1966 that sold on a Strauss & Co auction fetched R100,000), any number of reds from the extraordinary 1974 vintage and an impressive array of Zonnebloems and Lanzeracs dating back to the 1950s.
I tasted several of the recorked wines recently. I can safely say that, at the auctioneer’s estimates, you will never buy better great wine value than the 1974 Nederburg Auction Cabernet and the 1974 Overgaauw Cabernet: that’s an observation made without adding rarity to the equation. Once that becomes a factor, and if your pockets are deep enough, you should consider the GS Cabernets (1966 and 1968), the Rustenberg Dry Red 1974, and some of the ancient Lanzeracs and Zonnebloems.