2012 Series M

Mike Ratcliffe sold his shares in Warwick Estate to focus on Vilafonté, a joint venture with winemaker Philip Freese and Zelma Long. Given both of them hail from the United States, Vilafonté has always been imbued with a Californian air, though its vines call Paarl their home, not Napa. I visited Mike at their winery on the outskirts of Stellenbosch. “The 2018 could be the greatest vintage we have ever produced,” he explains, although I will not taste those until next year. “It has been off the charts in terms of extract and concentration. Last four or five vintages have been strong. The last couple of years we have managed the vineyards well and we built a dam to counter the drought.” I discover that around 40% of their demand is for older vintages and so with this in mind, Mike kindly offers a complete vertical of the “Series M” cuvée that you can find in this report alongside recent releases. Suffice to say that these will appeal to those who like Californian Merlot, often opulent in style, but with the structure to support it. These wines do benefit from cellaring and as such, give them six or seven years in bottle and you end up with wine that develops rewarding secondary scents and flavours.

A new, humbler André van Rensburg explained in detail why he brought in enologist Michel Rolland as a consultant. "I found myself getting depressed at the end of each harvest." The hugely talented van Rensburg, who had been making some of South Africa's greatest wines virtually since this spectacular old estate in Somerset West was purchased by mining giant Anglo American plc in the late 1980s, is now 53 years old and facing mandatory retirement at 60. "I've never made a 100-point wine so now there's a time factor," he told me.

He had no trouble convincing the owners to hire Rolland in 2013 (Rolland started with the 2014 harvest but was involved in the blending of the 2012s), and has been thrilled with the collaboration. The reds and whites here from Bordeaux varieties were always superb, but van Rensburg credited Rolland for making "a lot of tiny positive changes," including helping him isolate the best pockets of fruit. "And he's a great blender," noted van Rensburg, adding that with Rolland's help he would like the Vergelegen Estate White to be compared with Haut Brion Blanc.

My normal photo op on this estate with its spectacular 360-degree view encompassing the Hottentot Holland mountains, False Bay and the South Atlantic was marred ruined by smoke from a fire on the property that began as a controlled burn but soon spread in dry, windy conditions. As we tasted, we watched three helicopters ferry water back and forth from the estate's reservoir to the blaze.

As of vintage 2010, all of the Vergelegen wines come from the estate. On my most recent vintage, the white wines were especially impressive; van Rensburg noted that yields for the white grapes never go above 4.5 or 5 tons per hectare.