Château Lanzerac: 1961 – 1968
BY NEAL MARTIN |
I grew up at a time when South Africa’s apartheid system guaranteed its isolation from the rest of the world. As a teenager, I watched the news relaying township riots, the violence, sickening racism and injustice, and the seemingly endless incarceration of Nelson Mandela. Like most, I saw a country through the prism of shocking headlines. As a consequence, it is easy for an outsider to perceive South Africa as a country that only “began” after Mandela’s walk to freedom. This stunted view extends to wine. I once naively assumed that apart from the sweet wines of Constantia, the modern South Africa wine industry began in the mid-1990s. In a way it did. But the truth is that whilst the end of apartheid did create the foundations for what became today’s successful wine industry, the prosaic truth is that during the years of apartheid, people still fancied a glass of wine.
