There is little blessing in death, but upon the passing of a great winemaker and wine person, their spirit mercifully lives on in the wines that represent their legacy. As do, of course, the memories of that person’s life, as recalled by family and those who knew the deceased.

Achim von Arnim, one of South Africa’s true great wine icons, passed away this week. In his full life of 80 years, he ensured that memories of him will not easily fade. Just as those contours today lie against the Franschhoek mountains where the storms of two years ago scraped open the rock and soil, so have Achim’s spirit, humanity, and character established themselves in the wide expanse of the country’s wine diaspora.

The first time I saw Achim was in a television program the SABC broadcast in the early 1980s about the wine industry, which featured interviews with a few winemakers. My mother, Maureen, was then the editor of the magazine Wynboer, and the image of a lithe, clean-shaven young man speaking Afrikaans with a strange accent appeared on the screen.

“You can keep an eye on him, if you’re interested in the wine industry,” she said. “That’s Achim von Arnim, and he’s not just a brilliant and visionary winemaker, but an artist with the soul of a romantic and a philosopher.”

When I met him for the first time, about 15 years after that television appearance, and reminded him of my mother’s words, Achim said that her statement was – with respect – flawed. “Firstly, I am not a wine-maker, because wine cannot be made. We are vignerons, people who care for the vineyards and merely supervise how the vineyard gives birth to its grapes, which then transform themselves into wine to express their piece of earth of origin through flavour, aroma and balance. That’s something that simply cannot be made.

“And secondly, your mother forgot to mention that of all the wine-farmers who appeared in that television program, I was by far, but by far, the most handsome.”

Handsome or not, Achim was famous early in his career, namely as the man at the helm of the Boschendal estate in Simondium, where he was appointed in 1978. The farm was quite run-down then with no claim to wine fame, but Achim would turn the situation around within a decade. The status that Boschendal holds today as one of the country’s top wine farms and brands is largely thanks to Achim’s efforts.

Cap Classique played a large role here. This South African sparkling wine style, modelled on the traditional Champagne method, was first made at Simonsig in 1971, somewhat as an experiment. Achim, who developed a taste for French champagne in his childhood thanks to his mother, Theodora’s, food-and-wine knowledge and her hosting abilities, decided that a Cap Classique label would not only raise Boschendal’s reputation as a wine farm but also had the potential to become an important part of the South African wine category.

And with the help of his assistant, the Frenchman Jean-Louis Denois, who knew the tricks of champagne, Boschendal’s first Brut Classique from the 1981 vintage was made. It was created from a mix of grapes available on the farm at the time, such as Chenin Blanc, Clairette Blanche, Sauvignon Blanc, and Merlot.

“When I tasted my first Cap Classique, one I created myself, well then – as you Afrikaners say – ‘the die was cast’,” Achim recounted. “I love all good wines – Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz. But if you want to do something well as a professional wine person, you must focus. And at Boschendal, mine and Jean-Louis’s first Cap Classiques paved the way for my lifelong journey with Cap Classique.”

In addition to the satisfying enjoyment of the sparkling end-product, Achim considered the challenges associated with creating Cap Classique intriguing, challenging and stimulating, two factors that were important enough for him to retain his darting thoughts and his lifelong search for excitement and beauty.

“I know I carry this damned image of being a gung-ho, stubborn, and unconventional fellow,” Achim shared. “But what I am addicted to about being in the wine industry is that the end-product is the coming together of several non-negotiable disciplines, people bringing their knowledge and vision together for a shared outcome. The mantra is: discussion, planning, action, and control.”

Being of German descent, this more rigid nature of Achim’s personality had to emerge somewhere. He was, after all, trained at the famous Geisenheim Institute in Germany, where he studied during the same period as Danie de Wet of De Wetshof, whose lifelong friendship began during Danie’s first year at Geisenheim in 1969.

“Our training there was thorough and scientific, and it was already clear to me then that Achim was certainly an exceptionally talented wine person, cut out for the profession,” says Danie. “But that said, Achim did not always stick to the expected conventions. As students, we often had to take oral exams – in German, of course – in front of our professor and the whole class. Every student speaking had a glass of water to help them during the rather gruelling interrogation by the professor. Then it was Achim’s turn for his oral exam, and his throat got dry. Well, apparently too dry for water, because Achim simply pulled out a bottle of wine and an appropriate glass, poured it full, and drank the entire bottle empty during the oral exam.” 

Despite his success at Boschendal, Achim’s glass there was only half-full, and he could not see himself spending his entire career on a farm owned by a large corporate entity, namely Anglo American.

“I wanted to paint my own canvas,” he said. And that began after he bought the wine farm Clos Cabrière in Franschhoek while still at Boschendal, with the aim of establishing the country’s first cellar entirely devoted to Cap Classique.

He left Boschendal in 1989 to focus on Cabrière and the diverse range of Cap Classique wines he had started there since 1984, with Pieter Ferreira as his assistant.

As a brand, Cabrière’s success is obviously based on the quality of the wines, but the name could not have asked for a better personality than Achim’s to capture the consumer’s attention and imagination. His enthusiasm for his product – and wine in general – was as inspiring and infectious as his approach to life. During wine tastings at the Haute Cabrière cellar, he would sabre the tops off bottles of sparkling wine with a gleaming sword, just as his German military ancestors – allegedly – had done.

Achim’s wife, Hildegard – his rock – reminded visitors that many of the colourful, elegant paintings hanging on the tasting room walls were her husband’s own work. Between painting, writing poetry, and winemaking, there was also an inspired preoccupation with karate, something he practiced well into his middle years at a remote dojo in rural Japan.

Many talents, but for his friends, his greatest was his benevolence and his immense presence as a conversationalist and host at the head of a table, with bottles and glasses of wine and exquisite dishes that were devoured between the talking and drinking, with Achim’s exuberance leading the way. “Have you tasted that sweet German Riesling with the duck breast!?!…un-be-lievable!!” he would bellow.

One of my last notes made during one of our conversations reads where Achim says: “There are many beautiful and wonderful things in life, and I have experienced it all. But the most beautiful thing, listen to me now, the very most beautiful thing is to be able to share with other people.”

So Achim shared, and blessed the lives of others in doing so.

There are wines you respect. Wines you admire from a distance, the way you’d nod at a former girlfriend’s father who never really liked you. Polite, cautious, uninvested. And then there are wines you want to drink, with appetite, with mischief, with that low hum in the spine that says, hell yes, this is going to get out of hand, and I’m not giving a damn. Springfield’s Albariño from Robertson? That’s the latter. That’s the wine you open when you want to stop overthinking and start living.

Springfield, that gloriously semi-eccentric family winery in the dust-and-limestone heart of Robertson, is famous for its cult Sauvignon Blancs, bottles people speak of with the same hushed reverence usually reserved for religious relics, or maybe limited-release sneakers dropped from a helicopter. They’ve built a reputation on wines that tell you exactly what they think of you: no sugar-coating, no flab, no pandering. Honesty bottled. Defiance corked.

So when they decided to take Albariño. the salty little Galician grape that smells like the Atlantic flirting with citrus grove, and plant it in that there Robertson earth, the world should have paid attention. But Springfield doesn’t beg for attention; it simply makes the wine and lets the rest of us catch up whenever we get our act together.

Their Albariño is unwooded, of course. Oak would just get in the way. Oak would be like throwing a lace tablecloth over a Harley: unnecessary, misleading, a faint embarrassment. Instead, the wine ferments clean and bare, the way Springfield likes things, in being stripped down, transparent, accountable. No makeup, no costumes, no vanilla-scented smoke and mirrors. Just grape, soil, and the kind of obsessive cellar discipline usually associated with monks or psychopaths.

Pour the stuff and you get hit with aromas that wake the room up. Citrus that snaps: lime peel, grapefruit flesh, maybe some tangerine that wandered into the shot without a permit. But here’s the twist: once you taste it, the fruit gets complicated. Layered. A melange that’s more complex than DA head John Steenhuisen’s credit card statements. There’s stone fruit in the corner, green apple slicing clean through the mid-palate, then some fleshy pear nuance drifting in like it heard there was decadent trouble and wanted a part of it.

And underneath all that freshness, all that shimmering bright fruit, is the thing that makes me love this wine almost indecently: the rock. The mineral snap. The taste of crushed limestone and wet stone, of the soil speaking up, refusing to be ignored. That crunchy, salty, stony edge is like biting into a fruit someone dropped on the floor of a cathedral confession-booth where weird shit was said. It grounds the wine. Keeps it honest. Reminds you that good wine comes from good dirt, and Springfield’s dirt – ancient, stubborn, sun-baked – is very good indeed.

But let’s drop the pretence. The real truth is simple: Springfield Albariño is delicious. Sydney Sweeney-level delicious. Not the sort of sipping wine you treat like a thesis. This is a drinking wine. A bottle-that-becomes-two-then-some-more wine. A wine that demands a table, noise, the clatter of cutlery, the chaos of friends who make bad decisions with admirable confidence.

And seafood. All the seafood. Albariño has never met a creature with gills, tentacles or a shell that it didn’t immediately fall in love with. Oysters? Absolutely. Prawns dripping garlic butter? Essential. Angry little sardines scorched on a grill? Perfect. Mussels, linefish, calamari, octopus, that weird looking thing your cousin swears is edible, this wine links arms with all of it and dances.

This is a wine built for volume. Built for ice buckets sweating in the sun. Built for empty plates. Built for afternoons that accidentally roll into evenings and evenings that metastasize into stories nobody’s going to believe tomorrow. You don’t sip Springfield Albariño reverently; you let it flow, you let it run, you surrender to it like someone jumping into cold surf after a hot, stupid day.

But maybe the real reason I love this wine is that it reminds me why I fell for wine in the first place. Not because of the tasting notes or the certifications, not because of the swirls or the scoring systems or the gatekeepers who talk like they swallow a thesaurus for breakfast. No. I love wine because sometimes, if you’re lucky, it tastes like life: sharp, bright, salty, messy, joyful, fleeting.

And Springfield Albariño? It tastes exactly like that. Like life. Like the part worth living.

There are few things in life more humbling than standing at a bar, finger on a wine list, trying to order something you can’t pronounce without sounding like a tourist who got lost on the way to Oktoberfest. Enter Gewürztraminer. Half of humanity twists its tongue into a pretzel trying to say it. The other half just gives up and points.

Nora Thiel of Delheim has seen enough people suffer through this linguistic acid test to know it’s real. She swears online sales are rescuing the wine. “People can finally buy it without having to say it,” she laughs. Click, add to cart, avoid public humiliation. You don’t even have to pretend you know what those umlauts are for.

Delheim is one of the last South African holdouts still making the stuff, this fragrant, eccentric, often misunderstood white wine that smells like a florist shop crashed into a spice market. Only 70 hectares of it exist in the country, and almost half of that is in Stellenbosch. Not a big footprint. More like a cult.

Which suits Delheim just fine. If there was ever a Cape Estate that looked like it was carved out of the European subconscious, namely a mountain farm with old-world swagger and a soft spot for long lunches, it’s this one. Gewürztraminer belongs here the way eccentric uncles belong at family dinners: a little loud, unmistakable, but god, things would be dull without them.

The grape itself has a passport thicker than a retired airline pilot’s. Born near the Austrian border in Italy, named after the village of Tramin, it somehow became Gewürztraminer — “spiced Tramin” — because, presumably, someone decided “Tramin” alone was too boring for a wine that smells like litchi, roses and the kind of secret spice drawer your grandmother didn’t let you touch.

These days it’s most at home in Alsace, that French region with a German accent and the culinary borderland of choucroute, smoked pork and wines built to stand up to them.

South Africa’s affair with the grape started when Spatz Sperling — German-born, wry, stubborn in the way only men who know what good wine should taste like can be — planted it at Delheim in the 1960s. His buddy Frans Malan at Simonsig followed suit. One imagines the two of them sitting at battered wooden tables, tasting each other’s efforts, Spatz ribbing Frans: “Only a German can make real Gewürztraminer,” grinning like he’d just won a wager no one else knew had been placed.

Jancis Robinson, the kind of wine critic whose name carries the weight of a papal decree, calls Gewürztraminer one of the two most recognisable wine aromas on earth. (The other? Sauvignon Blanc.) She’s right. Delheim’s version hits you with litchi first, like a tropical fruit slapped across the nose, then comes the rose petals, the spice, the suggestion that somewhere, someone is cooking something worth leaving your job for.

Walk through the vineyards near harvest and you’ll notice the grapes themselves are pink-skinned. You’d be forgiven for thinking they’re destined for rosé. But the juice runs clear, a quiet magic trick the grape plays on anyone paying attention.

Delheim keeps the winemaking simple: stainless steel, cool fermentations, no fancy oak, just the raw, unfiltered personality of the grape bottled without apology. Besides the spice and tropical suntan on the nose, the wine is long, cool and refreshing, requiring for its drinking in greedy, thirsty draughts. It’s got lotsa flavours, and a flirtatious perky acidic edge akin to a French kiss from a chick who’s just immersed from a Wim Hof-inspired plunge, somewhere icy.

Spatz adored the stuff. To him, it tasted like home. I once saw him drinking a glass on a bleak, wet Stellenbosch winter afternoon while the rest of us were hunkered down with Cabernet Sauvignon. I asked why the hell he was drinking a cold white wine in weather better suited to whisky. He smiled — that wide, knowing, mischievous smile ­— and said, “Gewürztraminer will always bring a smile to your face. Any time. Any weather.” One of his Jack Russells dozed on his lap, clearly in agreement.

The guy fought for the wine, too. In the ’70s he even took a corporate behemoth to court for the right to use the traditional German bocksbeutel bottle. He lost, but then the world moved on anyways, leaving those dumpy bottles behind. Delheim’s sleek modern version won the aesthetic war without trying. There’s poetry in that kind of accidental revenge.

And food, don’t get any of the Sperlings started on food. Gewürztraminer is a culinary shapeshifter: it handles heat, spice, salt, earth. Pour it with a curry, a pile of wild porcinis after the rain, or that molten cheese fondue the Sperling family does come winter — the kind of meal that makes you question why humans ever stopped eating like medieval peasants. The wine just works. It’s joyful. Unpretentious. Honest.

In a world full of wines trying too hard to impress, Delheim’s Gewürztraminer sits there quietly, smelling like a bouquet left on your doorstep by someone who cares and tasting like the wine was made for reviving lost souls and allowing spirits to soar. All it asks is that you try saying its name without fear.

Or, you know, just order it online.

One of the more frightening examples of South Africa’s decline is to be found in the demise in quality of Nando’s, the ubiquitous chicken franchise whose colourful, omnipresent logo and quirky television commercials have catapulted it into the realm of purporting to be a South African institution, one which has also gained traction outside local borders, feeding chicken peri-peri and other creations to fast-food lovers in 30 countries.

Nando’s once had few keener supporters than myself. Founded in Johannesburg in 1987, Nando’s takeaways bleeped onto my Cape Town radar in the early 1990s, and from the outset I sought out a branch so as to partake in one of life’s great culinary pleasures: namely, peri-peri chicken and chips. And for years — decades — Nando’s did not disappoint.

My standard order of a full chicken, hot peri-peri, nourished me in times of hunger and sustained my soul when things were beating downwards. Arriving home with my brown-bagged chicken, I could not wait to release it from its wrapping, the fragrant wafts of perfectly grilled chook, garlic, peri-peri and lemon drifting through the house. Half the chicken would be plated next to a mound of golden-fried chips, and I would look at the blistered, flame-grilled skin, rivulets of fatty drops running glisteningly over the char, and thank the peri-peri heavens before digging in with a gusto that had my cat staring at me with curious eyes of wonder and concern, and hope for a leftover.

Then, the chicken had structure and texture and, above all, taste. The cooking process had allowed the flesh to remain tender, with an authentically flame-grilled fibrous structure that allowed the bird’s own tasty fat and the peri-peri sauce to find purchase in the depths of the flesh. I’d eat the marble-coloured breast first before removing meat and skin from the wings and legs, alternating the devouring of flesh with a delicious crunchy chip, the potato interior cleansing the palate and preparing it for the next bite of chicken.

Those were the days.

The past two years have, tragically, left me with a hollow, hurtful feeling of nostalgia for those days of pleasure provided by Nando’s, replaced with a set of experiences that can only be described as abominable. Still a keen and eager supporter of establishments doing chicken peri-peri, it pains me to state that Nando’s today offers the worst rendition of this dish to feature on my extensive reference points.

Friday past could only reaffirm this when I hopefully ordered a Nando’s delivery, an order I wished would erase the memories of the horrendous experiences of late that had accrued from the same franchise. It was not to be.

Despite the menu offering a range of diverse chicken dishes ranging from livers to wraps, kebabs and burgers, I stuck to that on which Nando’s reputation was built: namely, a whole peri-peri chicken and chips.

A hint of the downward spiral in quality was the lack of any aroma emanating from the Nando’s-logo-emblazoned brown paper bag, about the only aspect of the franchise that has remained intact. The bag’s contents were emptied into a white casserole dish, and I baulked at the sight, having to pinch myself. Was this the Nando’s I had come to know? What on God’s earth had happened?

The viewing of that thing sliding into the dish was almost as miserable as that of Kallie Kriel’s face during a podcast fighting for the cause of disenfranchised, supposedly genocide-fleeing Afrikaners — just without the facial hair and pursed lips. For here was a thing insulting anybody with the slightest predilection for a simple dish of grilled chicken.

Colour-wise, the butterflied bird had a hue that is almost impossible to describe in its ugliness. Grey comes instantly to mind, but coupled to the grey was a mysterious brownish yellow on the skin, some sort of attempt to present the chicken with a flame-grilled façade.

Now, I am by no means expecting Nando’s to pump out millions of 100% flame-grilled barbecued chickens per day. As a skilled cooker of poultry over open coals, I know the process takes at least an hour, impossible to replicate on a large scale. But in the past, Nando’s par-cooked chickens had been given sufficient time on the flame, allowing for the much-needed imparting of texture and flavour.

The 2025 version of Nando’s whole “flame-grilled” chicken looked like it had been boiled in a basin filled with the post-match shower water from a third-league football team in Bonteheuwel, before being reheated with a sputtering blowtorch.

A bit of prying into the flesh with my trusty Opinel knife and a fork revealed a mass of sogginess, congealed fat converging with a mysterious oiliness that gave the chicken an unhealthy-looking sheen promising to stop a pacemaker at three metres. Once again, the total lack of aroma alerted one to the fact that the meal was to be devoid of flavour and taste, and in this it did not disappoint.

Eating the breast meat was akin to consuming a piece of dense cardboard that had been simmered to a pulp in a pot of water containing a few crumbs of a chicken-stock cube. Slimy, flaccid meat slid from the leg and wing bones without the slightest hint of the comforting flavour one gets from an accurately cooked chicken. The skin, my favourite part, was alarming in its tastelessness, hanging shapelessly from the fork like a pre-Covid autumnal booger.

Unfortunately, the accompanying chips were not able to offer respite from this terrifyingly bad experience. Gone was the carefully deep-fried brittle coating, now replaced by pale potato shreds struggling to defy gravity, uninspiringly hanging from one’s fingers like stale, dead caterpillars. The taste was oily and bland, with an uncalled-for sweetish edge.

Having experienced exactly the same from Nando’s over the past couple of years, I am surprised by my continuing to be startled by the depths to which this once efficient chain of eateries has descended. All that is left is memory and nostalgia. But nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be.

So, without not even a whimper from the South African wine industry bodies, South Africa has withdrawn from the Great Wine Capitals, an important global network of wine tourism institutions. No communication here from the usual organisations who have over the past few years have – quite rightly – made a huge hoopla about the importance of the countries wine tourism sector, one that is a major contribution to the country’s vinous image. Yet a fact confirmed by international diplomats. South Africa pulled-out of the Great Wine Capitals in June, slyly deciding not to inform the industry players and public at large.

South Africa’s withdrawal from Great Wine Capitals (GWC) network is a move as perplexing as it is damaging. On the surface, it may seem like a bureaucratic adjustment or a budgetary trimming. In truth, it represents a strategic blunder that will undermine one of the country’s most dynamic and globally resonant industries, namely wine tourism. Wine tourism is not just about providing international visitors with experiences in the diverse and majestically scened winelands. It is about creating a relationship with these visitors, one seeing them lifelong proponents and supports of South African wine once they have returned to Idaho or Liverpool and Antwerp, Hong Kong Denmark and Cologne. And support, memories and conviction resulting from a South African winelands experience leads to continued wine purchases and sales. An emotional take-out.

Since joining the GWC in 2014, Cape Town and the Cape Winelands have enjoyed membership among a league of the world’s most celebrated wine regions incljding Bordeaux, Napa Valley, Mendoza, Verona, and others. The alliance offered far more than prestige; it provided access to shared expertise, marketing reach, and global recognition. Through initiatives such as the Best of Wine Tourism Awards and international networking events, South African producers found themselves on a global platform that consistently translated into real economic gain.

To put it plainly, wine tourism is not an indulgence for South Africa, it is a lifeline. The Western Cape’s vineyards attract more than a million international visitors each year, injecting around R36 billion into the regional economy and sustaining tens of thousands of livelihoods. From cellar-door sales in Stellenbosch to boutique hotels in Franschhoek and farm-to-table restaurants in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, this ecosystem thrives on the world’s curiosity about South African wine. GWC membership amplified that curiosity; it connected the Cape’s producers to global conversations about sustainability, marketing, and consumer trends.

The decision to walk away severs those connections at a time when they are most needed. Around the world, the leading wine regions are doubling down on collaboration and shared learning — from climate adaptation to digital engagement with younger consumers. South Africa, by contrast, risks receding into isolation. Without access to the GWC’s global forums and data networks, the Cape’s producers lose not only visibility but also the collective intelligence that drives innovation and resilience.

The implications extend well beyond prestige. Wine tourism operates as a multiplier: for every visitor to a tasting room, there are hotel bookings, restaurant reservations, and local art and craft sales. The loss of even a modest percentage of international visitors could ripple through rural economies, eroding job security and community development. For small producers already contending with the pressures of climate volatility, rising input costs, and a fragile currency, the GWC connection offered a bridge to markets that value authenticity and quality over volume.

One struggles to see the rationale. Whether the decision stemmed from administrative friction or funding constraints, it is difficult to reconcile with the broader strategic goals of South African tourism and export promotion. In an era when partnerships and global storytelling define competitiveness, the withdrawal reads less like prudence and more like retreat.

There is still time to correct course. The industry’s key bodies such as Wines of South Africa, South African Wine, Wesgro, and the Cape Winelands District Municipality must work together to reopen dialogue with the GWC and pursue reinstatement before the 2026 conference cycle. South Africa’s wine narrative, grounded in resilience and renewal, deserves a place at the global table.

To withdraw now is to silence a voice the world has only recently learned to hear. A voice shaped by centuries of craft, adversity, and extraordinary landscape. The world’s great wine capitals are in conversation; South Africa cannot afford to stop speaking.

Words: Lafras Huguenet

There’s no glamour in the Swartland. Just rock, wind, and a kind of hard light that makes you squint even when you’re not looking at the sun. It’s the sort of place where vines have to earn their keep, clinging to slopes of schist and quartz on Kasteelberg Mountain like they’ve made some long-term, bad-idea pact with survival.

This is Roundstone, the Mullineuxs’ patch of seriously bold dirt. One hundred hectares of stubborn, stony hillside that’s been beaten into giving up some of the most honest, well-structured and quite frankly statuesque wines in South Africa. Nothing here is easy, nothing is dressed up. And that’s exactly the point.

Chris and Andrea Mullineux don’t do fashion or shortcuts. They farm like they cook:  with precision, patience and the heartfelt need to provide something tasty that is as good for the soul as it is for the sensorial apparatus. The kids also like offal, which is a good thing. Offal-detesters are hard people to trust. And winemakers need all the trusting they can get.

Since 2008 they’ve been pushing toward organic, regenerative farming, not because it’s cool but because it’s the only way the land makes sense long-term. The soil’s alive, the vines are tough, and the fynbos –  that wiry, aromatic bush scattered through the vineyards – is part of the system. It keeps things balanced.

The wind here is relentless, a local enforcer that scrubs disease out of the canopy and slows the ripening to a crawl. That’s why the wines have a taut, reverberating tension. Because they’re forged under pressure.

Known for Syrah and Chenin Blancs, the Mullineuxs recently off-loaded two new harmoniously blended wines onto the market.

The Roundstone Blanc 2023

If white wines were people, this one would be the quiet type who doesn’t talk much but always has the last word. It’s a mix of everything that shouldn’t work together but somehow does: Macabeu, Chenin Blanc, Grenache Blanc, Clairette Blanche, Roussanne, Verdelho, Vermentino, Assyrtiko. A Mediterranean fever dream that’s been through Swartland boot camp, caressed by the sleight hands of Andrea and the sinewy cool direct approach of Chris.

The grapes are picked at dawn, when the air still has a bit of mercy in it, and pressed whole into barrels. No lab yeast, no sterile stainless-steel babysitting, just wild fermentation doing its slow, slightly dangerous thing. Seven months on the lees, eleven in oak, and then it’s bottled without filtering. What you see is what you get.

The 2023 vintage was a long, cool ride, and it shows. This wine doesn’t shout. It hums. From the heart, through the belly and the tune is crystal and sweet. Think white pear, fynbos, chamomile, and that faint mineral whiplash you get from stone and salt. It’s textured and firm, like a handshake from someone who’s worked for a living, and it finishes clean and long. The kind of white that makes you stop talking mid-sentence because something on your tongue just clicked into focus.

Only 1 770 bottles exist. If you’ve got one, don’t waste it on a hot-tub crowd. This thing will age twenty years easy, maybe longer. But if you’re opening it young, decant it and let it stretch its legs.

The Roundstone 2023

Now for the red. This one’s got muscle and manners in equal measure being a blend of Syrah, Grenache Noir, and Cinsault, all raised on the same stone-cut slopes. It’s the kind of wine that smells like the landscape it came from, all dark berries, fynbos, pure-earthed dust and sun, and tastes like someone decided restraint was the real flex.

Everything’s done by hand. The grapes are picked in the cool hours, whole-bunch fermented in 500-litre barrels, stomped the old-fashioned way, just enough to keep the cap wet. No stainless, no pumps, no over-extraction. You could call it minimal intervention, but that makes it sound trendy. It’s really just winemaking with a conscience and knowing when to do nothing.

After six weeks of slow fermentation and maceration, the wine goes back into barrel for 22 months. That’s where it pulls itself together. The tannins smoothing out, the structure tightening, the fruit taking on that clean, stony edge that only quartz and schist can give.

When you finally pour it, it’s got presence and the kind of texture that grips your gums but never bites. There’s a flicker of wildness, but it’s contained, disciplined. Best served at 16 to 18 degrees, decanted if it’s young. You’ll get a better conversation out of it that way.

Only 5 040 bottles made. Again, not a wine for the masses, but a wine for people who like things that taste like somewhere, not something.

And Roundstone is somewhere. Special. It isn’t some manicured estate with a tasting room playlist. It’s a working piece of land, and it behaves like one. Every vine looks like it’s survived something. The Mullineuxs don’t hide that, they build on it.

That’s what makes both the Blanc and the Red so damn compelling. They don’t pretend to be perfect; they just tell the truth about where they come from. And in wine, that’s rarer than you think.

If you’re lucky enough to stand on Kasteelberg in late afternoon, when the sun drops and the rocks turn gold, you get it. The wind dies down, the heat releases, and for a minute the place breathes differently. That’s the moment these wines are built on, a balance between beauty and struggle.

You don’t need to know the science of schist or the metrics of regenerative farming to feel it. You just need to taste. Because under all the talk of terroir and technique, what the Mullineuxs are really doing is simple: making wine that respects where it comes from, doesn’t fake a thing, and refuses to bore you.

There’s honesty in that. The kind of honesty that cuts through noise. Like good food, like hard work, like the Swartland itself.