2010 White Blend

Ian Naudé is a winemaker that keeps to himself. Naudé rather abhors the obsession with domestic competitions, tacky stickers declaring points from so-and-so and oh-so-controversial producer rankings – they are not the reason he gets out of bed each morning and thinks “wine”. Though a bit of a recluse, in person Naudé is funny, ebullient and garrulous. Meeting around the corner from my hotel he launches into the story of how he became one of South Africa’s most respected winemakers.

“In the beginning it was just me and Eben [Sadie],” Naudé reminisces. “We were both at Elsenburg Wine College together. He was two or three years behind me. Back then, we didn’t know anything about international wines. We started travelling, the first winemakers to really do so. We were big jokes in the industry as we didn’t stick to the rules. But we had new ideas. I did that [travelling abroad] for 10 years doing two vintages a year: Napa, Germany twice, France, Italy, Napa again and even in Israel. The story starts when I returned and moved to Stellenbosch and started Dornier. At that time, London was the hub of the wine world, but you would find South African wines at the back of the shop. I went the Bordeaux route and Sadie went the Mediterranean route. Buyers came to South Africa, and they didn’t really know about wine, just said they wanted wines that tasted like ‘other New World countries’. The industry was just copying trends.”

“Then we got to a point where other winemakers began to join us and we asked: What is South Africa? Who are we? What are we doing? We believed that white blends were the way forward but then they were bottom of the bottom. But terroirs is actually our thing. It’s New World meets Old World. We thought: Let’s do something nobody else can do. I realised that [is] blending different terroirs together. My blend would contain 15 to 25 vineyards and sealed with Screwcap. I wanted my wines to age when people wanted wine to drink within two years. I couldn’t sell the wines but I believed in it. Then agents began picking up on them, and it took off, around 2004 or 2005. It had taken ten years.”

“The white blend always has Chenin, Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon. I go into the vineyard two or three times. I don’t manipulate the wines and respect the vineyard, wines ferment naturally. I want the DNA of the variety to show and I stay in the background. Then I came across Rosa Kruger and old vines, which I decided to ferment separately to demonstrate the quality of South Africa. In this sense, we are neither Old World or New World. I just pick when the wine is ready and look at the alcohol on the day of bottling, when I get the analysis. I couldn’t care less before….it is what it is. I just do one gentle pump-over per day and ferment naturally - you have to pray that it starts fermenting. Grapes look for me. I don’t look for them. If somebody told me five-years ago that I would make a Colombard, then I wouldn’t believe them. I was looking for something interesting and drove past this vineyard. I went back to that block, and there was a connection. Nobody drinks Colombard, so I thought it would be a dead horse. I was planning to blend it, but as it turns out, I was stunned by the wine. Fruit for the 2020 Chenin Old Vines comes from the same vineyard as Miles Mossop’s. I went into the vineyard and thought somebody had stolen his grapes. Turns out he had already picked it!”

Ian Naudé is a winemaker who likes to keep himself to himself and let his wines do the talking. So I won’t say too much, except that his current releases – which tend to have some bottle age, as he prefers to withhold them from market – are wonderful, particularly his whites.