South Africa: where new world wine meets old

Wine pedagogues like to draw a line in the soil between the Old World and the New. There’s Europe, the cradle of fine wine. Then there’s most of the rest of the planet, which owes its success to quality European vine varieties imported over the past century or two. One nation, though, lies figuratively in the middle, South Africa. Usually lumped in with the New World, it has been cultivating European vines in the region around Cape Town for about 350 years, a legacy of Dutch settlers preoccupied with curbing scurvy among thirsty sailors.

History isn’t the only factor, though. There’s a gastronomically germane purpose to the Old-New distinction. To grossly oversimplify, European wines veer more toward the earthy, savoury end of the spectrum, while those produced in the generally sunnier climates of New World regions tend to be unapologetically fruity. Here, too, South Africa tends to fall somewhere in between. In the grape debate over which aesthetic reigns supreme, South Africa is the land of wine détente.

Or is it? In one exciting respect Cape producers seem to be veering toward the European model more than ever, through blends. Rather than producing wines entirely, or almost entirely, from a single variety and declaring it on the bottle – the norm in the New World, where so-called varietal wines such as “chardonnay” and “merlot” dominate – they’re crafting more and more multi-grape cuvées. Proponents of the mix-it-up approach argue it offers more latitude to craft a perfectly balanced beverage every year. The idea is to add a pinch more of this and dollop more of that based on the relative flavour of each grape, the way a chef fine-tunes a soup.

In some cases the grape mix isn’t even listed on the label. That’s an implicit nod to such regions as Bordeaux and the Rhône Valley, where commune and village names such as Pauillac and Châteauneuf-du-Pape reign supreme.

Unlike in Europe, though, most blends from South Africa carry fanciful proprietary names specific to each producer, such as Bellingham Fair Maiden and Ernie Els Big Easy, rather than generic village or commune signifiers. There would be little sense in labelling a wine Jonkershoek, for example, because grape combinations and regional styles strongly associated with each district, or “ward,” have yet to emerge in South Africa the way they did over centuries in Europe. A consumer wouldn’t know what to expect from a Jonkershoek.

It may take a few more decades of post-apartheid investment and collective planning before South Africa comes up with classic styles based on geography – its own Châteauneuf-du-Capes, so to speak.