Finding Cool Sunshine: South Africa

BY NEAL MARTIN | APRIL 08, 2021

Better Late Than Never

The pandemic banjaxes carefully laid plans, changing or canceling them without notice. Since the rise of COVID-19, a trip to South Africa has been untenable due to travel and quarantine restrictions, and as I write this on the anniversary of the UK lockdown, who knows when I can return? Hopefully soon, because I miss the achingly blue skies, the dramatic landscapes, the exotic flora and fauna, and not least the people, who despite hardships all seem to have smiles on their faces. For all the media headlines portraying South Africa as a cauldron of dangerous variants, from the perspective of winemakers in the Cape, life continues pretty much as normal given the circumstances. Without wishing to diminish the impact of the virus, the population of South Africa has always faced huge problems. Everything is relative; this is just another obstacle to overcome. The biggest impact has been the government’s vacillating imposition of domestic alcohol bans, blockages at the port and efforts to ensure that workers stay safe. 

My annual South Africa report had to outwit the hurdles placed in its way. Samples were sent to the UK for tasting last September, in limited numbers because of the short window before my schlep to Burgundy. When that trip had to be brought forward due to an unprecedented early harvest, the bottles waited patiently in London for my return. Alas, there was another lockdown, and in the end, I could only enter the capital safely in early March. Along with the February article, South Africa – A Delayed Primer, the notes herein would have appeared last October. That said, many are still the latest releases and deserve attention. I must emphasize that omissions do not imply that a producer’s wines did not deserve inclusion – far from it. It was simply a matter of limited time. The result is that I am already hatching plans for a follow-up report later this year with a larger number of producers.

Duncan Savage, in a selfie taken in his winery in Cape Town.

Growing Season Summaries

Here I provide basic summaries of three growing seasons, though readers should note that these are generalizations. There can be significant differences between Wines of Origin.

The 2018 vintage was challenging due to the worst drought conditions in a century. This led to water rationing and spells of frost damage. The general growing season was slightly cooler than usual. The final crop was picked late and down 15% on the previous year, exacerbated by uneven flowering and small berry size. On the plus side, much like Bordeaux and Burgundy, the dryness meant there was little rot or disease. Andrea Mullineux explained that the drought conditions seemed to encourage the yeast to “eat” the glucose sugar first, leaving unwanted residual fructose in the wines; hence they practiced more cold maceration to encourage the yeast to consume both sugars.

Two thousand-nineteen saw a further minor decrease in quantity of 1.4% from 2018. The previous year’s drought meant that vines were still recovering. Continued water rationing left some winemakers unable to irrigate their parched vines. Windy conditions during flowering led to poor fruit set. A cool and inclement March caused slow ripening; therefore, the harvest was again later than normal. That said, Duncan Savage told me that there was not the “crazy heat” of previous years. The season favored later-ripening varieties due to rain at the end of February, with some reds finding it a challenge to achieve phenolic ripeness. But the successful wines performed very well with slightly more refined tannins than 2018 (oddly, much like Burgundy).

The 2020 vintage brought with it an end of drought-ridden seasons and an increase in production of 8.2% over the 2019 harvest. The weather was more benevolent than in 2019, though yields were stymied by (again) windy conditions during fruit set and small berry size. Harvest was around a fortnight earlier than usual, though wineries had to contend with lockdown from March 26. A last-minute concession by the government permitted the harvest to proceed, which meant that the remaining 40,000 metric tons of hanging fruit was not left for the birds.