Variety is the spice of life, and the dreams of many a winemaker. Thus, the geographical make-up of the Cape winelands must be heaven for winemakers with open minds and ambitions to create vinous diversity, unshackled from the restrictions imposed by European AOCs limiting vineyard plantings to official regional boundaries.

For a winemaker seeking it, the canvas here down south is blank. Hence South Africa’s ability to present excellent wines made from a diversity of grape varieties growing, literally, alongside each other. It is an often overlooked blessing that a Cape estate is capable of delivering – for example – brilliant, world-class Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chenin Blanc and Merlot grown on one patch of 80ha soil. This reality might have the tight-fisted Bordeaux and Burgundian minds tipping berets in disbelief, but it is one of the Cape realities to be embraced and showcased.

This multiplicity also finds its way into the personalities of the local winemakers. Take, for example, Johan Jordaan, cellarmaster at Stellenbosch wine behemoth Spier. Fondly also known as Pie, Johan is often marketed by his employer as one of the Cape’s Chenin Blanc maestros, a tag backed-up by his winning the Master Winemaker Top 100 award for best Chenin Blanc – two years running. And in the same breath, Johan is effortlessly presented as a leading and convincing voice for Pinotage and Shiraz, and I am sure he can command authoritative talk on any variety and wine blend under the Spier label. As a cellarmaster should.

Pie’s versatile skill was recently on show around the Grenache grape, another variety he appears to master with effortless ease. The occasion was to introduce three new wines in Spier’s Ideology range of wines, a limited release allowing winemakers to express their creativity and make something outside of the winery’s conventional range. And Grenache is the focus of the latest Ideology set-up, three renditions comprising a Grenache Noir, Grenache Blanc and a pretty Grenache Rosé.

To add creative irreverence to this Ideology range, the Ideology labels include Johan’s doodle drawings and handwritten notes, providing the wines’ aesthetic with a quaint thumbprint of authenticity.

For the grapes’ origin, Johan and his Spier wing-girl Tania Kleintjes went Paarl and they went organic. With Paarl being a tad warmer and muggier than Stellenbosch, this environment is deemed ground zero for a Rhône grape such as Grenache, both Blanc and Noir.

Grenache, reckons Pie, is “the grape that took Cinderella from the kitchen to the ballroom”, words now immortalised on one of the Ideology labels and implying that the seemingly ordinary can – in the right hands – be transformed into a picture of desirable elegance and beauty.

Much of the talk surrounding Grenache is of old vineyards. From Australia, Priorat in Spain to the Rhône, producers fall over themselves to mention their Grenache vineyards being 50 years and older. In the Ideology series, the opposite rings true as the wines are made from super young Grenache vineyards, namely four years old – Blanc – and six years for the Noir. This is, to my mind, a determiner of the stylistic nuance found in all three renditions, namely a deft touch in terms of extraction and tanning management, with little to no use of ageing vessels.

The Ideology Grenache Blanc 2026 sets the tone with its vivid, brisk presence that bears the garrigue and mown hay features of the variety without the dimpled fleshiness that this grape can show when the stocking is pulled aside. The technique is simple: Destemmed and crushed into stainless-steel tanks. Fermented in temperature-controlled stainless-steel tanks. Matured for four months on its gross lees.

Here Grenache Blanc shows it has more than enough impressionable fragrance and flavour to deliver a pedigreed dry white wine without skin-contact and old-wood ageing, as is so often the want. The crushed herbs aroma is pulled through to the palate where this flavour combines with sharp citrus, salt-lick and a hint of savouriness to create an immensely charming and satisfying white wine. And the texture is just so very right: none of that crayon-waxiness the variety sometimes shows, yet enough subtle grip on the palate to assert itself.

To the pink, and the Ideology Grenache Rosé 2026 immediately catches the eye with a colour true enough to a Provençal rosé to make one smell the bouillabaisse fumes from the kitchen. Immediately pressed, the juice was fermented in temperature-controlled stainless-steel tanks and allowed to mature for four months on its gross lees. With Grenache Noir being one of the universally blue-blooded rosé grapes, including a pink in the Ideology series was a no-brainer. It’s perfect, classic rosé more-ishness: drier than a nun’s seat during confession, the edge of Grenache skins imparts a tasty berry edge, providing the kind of all-day wine-drinking approachability a fine rosé demands.

Compared to the above two wines, the Ideology Grenache Noir 2025 demanded a bit more work. At harvest bunches were hand-sorted, with semi-carbonic maceration methods used during natural fermentation. This took place in a combination of stainless-steel tanks and old oak barrels.

This is Grenache Noir that has had its jacket removed, the young vines and limited use of wood allowing the grape to show an edgy, restless side compared to the plush, deep-fruited styles of Grenache older vines tend to show.

A nose of tomato-leaf and green plums leads to a bright, exuberant presence on the palate with shards of fruit darting about and playfully intermingling with the pricks of thin-skinned Grenache tannins. This is the fun-side of Grenache. Served chilled – as per Ideology HQ recommendation – the wine harnesses dark and red fruit with a deft, balletic palate weight making it finely balanced between austerity and predictable rounded, silked plushness, as so often the case with Grenache. Where, in the hands of Johan and Spier, the Pie’s the limit.

En masse, the world’s leading critics, sommeliers and wine buffs are constantly waxing lyrical about it, and the grape has delivered some of the most revered wines on earth, growing in extreme German terroir where viticulture has been practised for as long as it has in the revered realm of Burgundy. So, what’s the deal with Riesling, so often spoken and written about, receiving as much media coverage as overworked vinous topics such as regenerative farming and Swartland Shiraz, yet not finding real commercial traction in the wine world?

In the world of white wine, Chardonnay remains the commercial benchmark. It is the most planted white variety in the world at roughly 200 000 hectares, and it works at every price level, from entry-level unoaked styles to top Burgundy. Consumers understand it and that versatility keeps it moving.

Sauvignon Blanc sits just behind. At roughly 120 000 hectares globally, it has built its success on clarity. People know what to expect: fresh, aromatic, immediate. Marlborough, Sancerre, Stellenbosch … the style reads clearly wherever it comes from. In the UK and US especially, it is the default restaurant white.

Riesling, by contrast, is niche. Global plantings sit around 60 000 hectares, concentrated in Germany, Alsace, Austria and Australia, with smaller pockets in Washington State, the Finger Lakes, New Zealand and South Africa. It rarely troubles the top ten in volume in major export markets.

This is despite brilliant wine scribes such as Jancis Robinson and Terry Theise going to regular extraordinary lengths to muster enthusiasm for the great German grape. Robinson describes Riesling as “one of my great wine heroes” and says, “For as long as I have taken wine seriously, Riesling has had a special place in my heart.” Yet, despite the world’s leading wine writer professing a love for Riesling for 50 years, it still hasn’t caught on with the bulk of the world’s wine drinkers.

I, too, would truly like to see the day when Riesling claims similar worldwide appeal to that achieved by Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio. Still, for some reason or other, this has just not happened – despite the variety’s ability to offer the same kind of vinous enthrallment, from refreshing gluggers to site-specific, meticulously crafted wines that can hold their own against a top Burgundy or Sancerre.

Perhaps it is, as in the case of South Africa, a result of Germany’s national image just not being aligned with what consumers expect from a winemaking country. That national vibe portrays a reputation of orderliness, organisation, mechanical efficiency and regimental competence, tied to an aggressive churlishness. When it comes to buying a car, a piece of mining equipment or a functional kitchen appliance, German brands are in high demand. But all the warm-blooded, personable lifestyle offerings are deemed far more desirable if they originate from France, Italy or Spain.

Take German cuisine, for example. Can one really blame an outsider for not taking German wine seriously when that country’s culinary offerings centre on well-girthed sausages, smoked fatty pork, cabbage and potatoes? Compare German food to the colourful and diverse tables of France and Italy, and it is a no-brainer in assuming that the latter nations take taste and pleasure more seriously than the land of the Big Eisbein. And seeing that wine appreciation runs parallel to the assumption of the state of a wine-producing country’s heart, Germany falls short in desirability, as does its lovely national grape, Riesling.

This is a pity, as the German wine industry has origins similar to those of the world’s great wine regions, such as Burgundy. Emperor Charlemagne, he of Corton-Charlemagne fame, was regulating viticulture and winemaking in Germany back in the 8th century. And just as was the case in Burgundy, the Benedictine monks were responsible for parcelling terroir-specific sites and making wine in the Middle Ages. Burgundy, for example, has its ‘Clos’ and Germany its ‘Kloss’.

But in the greater wine picture, even the most loyal German wine ambassadors have to admit that they have been far outdone by the French and many other wine countries in terms of generating a global affinity for their Riesling and other wines.

When the mood for Riesling strikes, as now, South Africans are limited to slim pickings. Local offerings are scarce – even the great Cape sage of Riesling that is Danie de Wet, who learnt his winemaking at Geisenheim Institute in Germany – has called it quits and pulled his Riesling vineyard on De Wetshof.

Paul Clüver in Elgin remains one of the die-hards, and when I saw the 2026 vintage was released a week ago, I hastily procured a case of six. The occasion of Spring being in the South African air and general philosophical thoughts on Riesling and dirndl-clad blonde maidens, led me to drink the first two bottles accompanied by much pondering on what this cultivar offers.

Riesling was one of the first varieties planted in 1987 on the De Rust farm in Elgin – home of Paul Clüver Family Wines – with the cold climate and the hardy Bokkeveld shale soils deemed appropriate for the grape. At that time, Paul Clüver was still teaming up with Nederburg, where maestro Herr Günter Brözel was running the show. And if the Herr assumed Elgin was good for Riesling, one can bet one’s last pair of lederhosen that it is so.

The Paul Clüver Riesling 2026 originates from vines at 300m above sea level, the ocean only 20km off, giving the farm a combination of maritime and continental climates, something I have always found unique about the Elgin appellation. After the grapes are destemmed and crushed, the pressed juice is settled and racked to oak foudres and stainless-steel tanks for fermenting. Grapes from different blocks are fermented separately. 35% of the wine was fermented in the 2 500-litre foudres with the remainder in stainless-steel tanks.

Andries Burger, Paul Clüver’s winemaker, wants to hang onto some of the floral fruit in the grape. This he does by lowering the temperatures of certain vessels so as to arrest fermentation. This ‘fruity’ segment is later blended with the dry-fermented parcels to give the Riesling its natural off-dry glow, sitting at a residual sugar of 14%.

The result is a showcase of what Riesling can offer, namely a fine, brilliant and simply delicious white wine that exudes the traits I love in this cultivar. It is fresh as driven snow and from the outset shows a whistle-clean purity.

It is just impossible to resist glugging the first mouthful in its entirety, such is the moreish splendour. Assessing the wine a few sips down, it is apparent that despite the fresh accessibility and the pulsating bright verve, there is a lot going on.

The nose shows wafts of honeydew melon and jasmine in bloom. Initially sprightly and teasing on the palate, the flavours cascade in runs from the natural world, recalling images of dense forests, verdant wild grasses running up steep mountain slopes and icy streams gushing from glaciers. The pastoral vigour splashes tastes of crunch and juice, and slivers of ripe fruit. Green apple and forelle pear, with a dollop of frigid cantaloupe. Fig peel brushes by, while the discernible grip of lemon zest clings for an instant before being washed away by plucked sorrel and a chunk of crushed quince.

The line of taste is taut and seamless, offering a Swiss-clock precision in the balance between a pulsating heart of flavour offerings and the rapt acidity desired to move the wine forward as an upright, commanding and startlingly engrossing living thing. It knows where it wants to go, and if this should be in my direction, it has arrived. And always shall.

Italy’s Alto Adige province in the nation’s northern parts can, even by Italian standards, be a place of confusion. Road-signs and place names are shown in Italian and German, and the local inhabitants speak Italian with German accents, as well as emitting Germanic phrases with a romantic Italian slant. Pizza and pasta are sidebars to menus focussed on hearty meat-driven dishes such as veal with tuna sauce, bloody mounds of steak tartare and aromatically bloody portions of venison and game-birds.

But then one must think of the history of Alto Adige, also known as South Tyrol. Up until 1914 this was Austria. Then the Italian fascist regime decided they’d like a piece of mountainous Austrian real estate, taking over the region and incorporating it into the Italian empire. Thus, the apparently seamless combination of Italian and Austrian culture adds to the distinctive and visceral natural charm of Alto Adige, which is also one of Italy’s leading wine regions. Arguably its best white wine area, although with the diverse range of other loyal and patriotic provinces looking on, you don’t want to say this too loudly.

And this was exactly why I found myself there a week back, together with Thys Louw, proprietor and winemaker of Diemersdal, and his wingman in the cellar, Juandré Bruwer. The red wines of Italy, Barolo and Super Tuscans especially, are world famous. Whites? Not so much. But, as we discovered in Alto Adige, some of the world’s finest white wines can also be found in this country of vinous multitudes, and if proof is needed, it is right here up north.

Our base was the town of Merano, a quaint, ancient spot at the end of a spectacular valley. And make that Valley with a capital, as there is some serious mountain action going on here in Alto Adige on account of the province being home to the Dolomites.

The valley floor is flat and even and broad, covered with thousands of apple trees bearing the region’s other agricultural commodity outside of wine. On each side of the valley bed, mountains climb high and steep and seemingly endless, over 3000m, with vineyards clinging to the glistening smooth rock faces to altitudes touching 1000m. Standing on the valley floor you sense mountain and rock and big things making you feel very small, which is indeed your place in nature. It is a wondrous cathedral under open, broad azure skies.

Lots of wine-tasting was done, the first stop being Cantina Terlan, one of the oldest and most reputable wineries in the region. Like most, Terlan is a co-operative, a small one by South African standards. With 143 producer-members farming under 200ha of grapes, Terlan can lay claim to being a boutique co-operative if the term existed. The boutique refers not only to size, but to mindset: 40 years back the various Alto Adige co-ops decided to get rid of innocuous bulk varieties, plant what the world wants and what the area can do well, and focus on premium quality wine. The result? In three days of extensive Alto Adige immersion, our party did not taste a single wine that was not of extraordinary quality. And all bar one were made in co-operative cellars.

Main grape varieties at Cantina Terlan are Pinot Bianco, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, the latter being the reason the Diemersdal crew ended up here, and the lay of the vineland leading to the wines is interesting from a geographical point of view. All vines are grown on the mountain slopes, and as has already been alluded to, there is a different mountain on each side of the valley.

The rock on the east side is of volcanic origin comprising quartz porphyry bedrock and hence more acidic than an Italian mamma’s tongue after you’ve asked for Tabasco with the Carbonara. On the other side of the valley, the high mountain is pure limestone. With Terlan’s growers scattered on both sides of the valley, the winemakers thus have access to fruit of startlingly differing chemistries, assisting in the creation of truly extraordinary wines.

Two of the best wines tasted from Terlan:

Vorberg Riserva Pinot Bianco 2023

The Vorberg wine comes off the amphitheatre where Terlan’s vineyards climb steeply from around 450 to 650 metres, facing south to southwest on slopes that tip past a steepness grading of 70% in places. It’s a demanding site to farm and that’s rather the point: Pinot Bianco planted this high, on ground this steep, has to work for every gram of sugar, and the wine shows it. And this is what makes Alto Adige Pinot Bianco worth seeking out, as the extreme geography and natural stress the vines are put through allow this variety to shift past that point of comfortable neutrality it so often sticks to.

Climate, too, plays a huge role in the vineyard offering. The main Alpine chain shields Terlan from Atlantic weather and cold northerlies, while the valley opens south to Mediterranean influence, and the result is a genuine day-night temperature swing driven by cool downslope winds off the mountains. With a westerly to south-westerly exposure, the sun is already high by the time it clears the ridge, giving more direct light and less diffusion, which sharpens the contrast between this side of the valley and the shadier slopes opposite.

In the cellar the approach stays deliberately unhurried. Grapes are picked and sorted by hand, pressed gently as whole clusters, and the must is left to clarify by natural sedimentation rather than filtration. Fermentation runs slow, at controlled temperature, in large oak casks, a 700l and a 300l barrel doing the work rather than small new wood. Malolactic fermentation follows, then twelve months on the lees in traditional wooden barrels before release.

The result is a white wine of vivid clarity that tastes of cool and of forest and of rock. You can hear the rising trout make huge splashes as they jump in their river pools; you can feel the mist rising off gushing streams. And it tastes lovely, the crispness being taut and echoing, instead of sharp and brief. Runs of quince and green pear peer from behind veils of spring orchard blossom, with a kind coil of salinity. A complete white wine.

Quarz 2024

Quarz comes from Sauvignon Blanc planted on south to southwest-facing slopes, between 300 and 550 metres, on gradients that range from a gentle 10% up to a calf-cramping 40%.

The mountain’s mineral poverty is seen as a major role-player in the finished wine. Terlan winery’s research into these soils points to a subvolcanic body beneath the vineyards that behaves differently from typical Alpine volcanic rock, and the scientists attribute the wines’ saltiness and tension to the vines’ own reaction to that stress.

In the cellar the fruit is picked and sorted by hand, then pressed gently as whole clusters, with the must left to clarify through natural sedimentation rather than mechanical filtration. Fermentation runs slow and at controlled temperature, and the wine spends nine months on its lees split evenly between large wooden barrels and stainless steel. The two halves are blended three months before bottling.

Being the first Sauvignon Blanc tasted on the trip, the Terlan Quarz 2024 immediately announced the fact that, as lovers of this variety, we had come to the correct address, here in Alto Adige.

It is an extraordinary Sauvignon Blanc. The growing matter may be poor and rugged and mountainous, the slopes steep and unforgiving, but the wine has an immense amount of kindness offering a degree of goodwill instead of overt fruit-driven generosity. Not a breath of pyrazine is present in the wine, nor any cut-grass or tinned-pea. No restlessness in the wine, whose presence in the mouth was complete and full without any impressionable showiness. I tasted a sprinkling of ruby grapefruit and a wash of thick lemon peel, but these were subtle sideshows to a wine of alluring and confident complexity, broad and satisfying and totally mesmerising. Simply put, another wine from another region underscoring the fact that Sauvignon Blanc is one of the world’s great grape varieties for winemaking. And absolutely no confusion about that.

Among the extensive suite of South African wine competitions, the various Top 10 accolades, based on grape variety, have become institutions on the wine calendar for producers, interested parties in the trade and media, as well as among the members of the public following the wine industry. Absa Pinotage Top 10, FNB Sauvignon BlancSA Top 10 and Standard Bank Top 10 Chenin Blanc are focused competitions, aimed at telling the world which South African wines made from the respective grape are deserved of being recognised as the 10 best the country has to offer.

I like this format. It is clear and direct, without followers of, say, Chenin Blanc wines having to wade through a long list of competition results deciphering layers of Double Gold, Gold, Silver or Bronze medals. The message from the Top 10s are: of all the wines entered, these have been adjudged to be the 10 best wines from this or that grape variety.

Although, it is not always.

With the Absa Pinotage and FNB Sauvignon BlancSA competitions, no producer can have more than one of its wines entered eligible for a Top 10 spot. As was the case this year in the Pinotage competition, one winery can have two or more wines adjudged worthy of a place among the Top 20 finalists. But cometh the hour, and the Top 10 is announced, only a single wine from one producer may make it on the list of trophy winners.

The Chenin Blanc Association does it different, having decided to simply put the best wines on its list of Top 10 achievers, regardless of them being different wine styles and different vintages originating from the same producer.

From a marketing perspective, limiting the Top 10 winners to 10 wines each made by a single different producer – as is the case with the Pinotage and Sauvignon Blanc shows – might seem appropriate. Having the name of one producer appearing two or three times in the attention-grabbing list of 10 wines can seem repetitive as well as limiting the competition’s promotional cache. Punting 10 different producers under one banner appears more inclusive and varied, granted.

However, calling the competition a “Top 10” is a misnomer if the 10 best wines entered and tasted blind by the judging panel are not all in contention for a seat on the winners’ podium. It should be a producer’s democratic right to expect every wine he or she entered into the Top 10 competition to stand a chance of garnering a top spot. And it is the right of those following these shows to expect the very best entries to be found on the Top 10 list. For what value lies in a Top 10 list if, say, a wine scoring 95pts has to be kicked-off the winners rostrum to make way for a wine of 93pts, just because the aforementioned is made by a producer who already has one in the final tally?

It all becomes a little shady when one takes into account the fact that the competition organisers are happy to take three or four entry fees from a single producer, but said winery’s chance of winning is limited to only one wine.

If you call it a 10, make it a perfect one.

You have been around all corners of the Cape Winelands, yet it is to the Valley that you always long to return. The Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, that is, a portion of this earth cut by a heavenly scythe all those millions of years ago, which now lies in aching beauty under azure skies and is the birthplace of some of the best wines on from the Africa of South. Simple, just that.

And if wine was purely judged as an expression of the wonder and distinction of its sense of place, Hemel-en-Aarde would be at the forefront of the globe’s vinous offerings.

Despite having, over the past three decades, grown into an area with three distinct wards and a number of producers, the Hemel-en-Aarde’s mothership will always be Hamilton Russell Vineyards. There, where it all began with Tim Hamilton Russell’s exploratory forays into viticulture and winemaking, leading to his first vintage, an estate Pinot Noir, in 1981. Hamilton Russell Vineyards’ status as the leader of this pedigreed pack of the area’s fine wine producers was underscored this week with a characteristically convivial, atmospheric and engaging gathering on the estate to taste, among others, the new-release vintages of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and to jointly raise a glass to 45 years of winemaking at Hamilton Russell Vineyards.

Such visits to the spread outside the coastal town of Hermanus are always enriching experiences, days that folk like me count themselves blessed to be in the wine industry. Besides being the true Hemel-en-Aarde original, Hamilton Russell offers a brand of rarefied hospitality and certain character-laden features that are always truly unique and memorable.

A welcome in the underground barrel cellar was followed by a jaunt up the hill to Casa Anthony Hamilton Russell, second-generation proprietor, where the clearest, brightest of late-winter days had created a spectacular prism through which to view the Valley in all its magnificence: Runs of gun-grey granite hilltops, leading down to a patchwork of indigenous fynbos, bare vineyards and soils in a variety of pale, russet and earthily dark shades. The beauty, a marriage of dedicated and respectful agriculture and eternal nature, was compounded by the stillness of the air and the gentle beams of a friendly, smiling midday sun. It was magnificent.

A generous number of guests assembled on the porch of Anthony’s Braemar House, everyone in high spirits due to the day outside and the joy of being there, sipping glasses of cool Chardonnay and nibbling on the usual array of curated culinary offerings. But in this celebratory herd of bon vivants, there was truly only one that stood out, and that was the host himself, Anthony Hamilton Russell.

Impeccably attired, as usual, this time Anthony had forgone the light tweed jacket to don a très chic jacket made of dark velvet. The smile was warm and disarming as ever, and the scent from Anthony’s Romeo and Juliet Short Churchill Cuban cigar added to the atmosphere, which resembled a party scene in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, just without the stiff upper lips and anally retentive smirks.

Watching Anthony work the space, laughing and chatting to the array of members of the wine trade – some of whom he had never met before – I was reminded of the words of Robertson wine legend Danie de Wet, who said that, of all the people he had encountered in his 55 years in the wine industry, Anthony is the best ambassador for South African wine he had ever seen.

Together with this genuine personable charm, what continues to impress me about Anthony is his inextinguishable enthusiasm for his property and the only two wines made there: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. One each, that is, not a collection within a grape variety. This has been going on since he came back to Hamilton Russell Vineyards to take over from father Tim in the early 1990s, making Anthony’s success a masterclass of that five-letter word that is so lacking among many of today’s Cape producers, and that is focus.

The initial assembly on the Braemar porch led to a tasting on the spacious top level, where Anthony led the way – as usual – and the exercise was successful on two fronts. Fact is, guests are always impressed when the proprietor himself does all the introducing of and talking about the wines. And, secondly, due to his teeth-cutting in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, nobody in the region is more inextricably linked to this country than Anthony himself.

So, for anyone wanting a low-down on the geography, this was the correct address to come to and to listen. Iron and shale and clay soils. The raw, indecipherable vagaries of a southern Cape climate. Certain other locals tend to refer to the Hemel-en-Aarde region as a “little Burgundy”. An introduction by Anthony will correct this misassumption: unlike Burgundy, Hemel-en-Aarde is a severe coastal region, and there’s no limestone in the earth, mos. (Wine Guide for Dummies101)

The introductions to the new-vintage releases of Hamilton Russell Vineyards Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, both from the comet 2025 vintage, focussed on sense of place and the beauties of each variety without being bogged down with extraneous technical details.

Chardonnay, says Anthony, is like the child that does its homework on time, makes its bed in the mornings and occupies itself meaningfully throughout the day. Pinot Noir, that’s the kid that needs care and a sterner, disciplined and all-attentive hand.

Both kids, however, are gorgeous when grown at Hamilton Russell and vinified by winemaker Emul Ross, who, to my mind, has brought an added degree of refined accessibility to the wines.

Barely 20 months after vintage, Hamilton Russell Pinot Noir 2025 is as approachable as a recently divorced 50-year-old brunette at the Hermanus Golf Club, just without the hair-streaks, clunky jewelry or bumped-up Botox. The wine immediately charms with a wet rim of sour cherry and blossom before a beautifully honest pastoral tannic grip takes hold and squeezes gently. Hamilton Russell Pinot Noir shies away from any indication of velvety strokes and secretive whispers: the earth here offers a complete red-wine Pinot Noir, displaying the ethereal complexity of the heartbeat grape together with a firm spine and assertive personality. It is gorgeous and it is class. (10 months in oak, 25% new.)

The 2025 Chardonnay proves that, with the growing splendour of Cape Chardonnay offerings, Hamilton Russell is still in the leading charge. Nine months in wood, 25% new fill, the barrel is the frame allowing the canvas to dazzle. White flowers and grilled nuts. Key lime zest on melting Brittany butter. Expansive in the mouth, engaging, yet with a breezy curtain of zesty acidity allowing the joy to expand, glow, wonder.

These wines, this place, these people. It is heaven for a day, always remembered.

Rosé wines do not appear to get much thought in wine discussions due to their perceived accessible simplicity, with the two major distinctions within the category falling between the sweetish candy-floss pink wines and the drier, Provençal versions. The former were all the rage four decades back when Mateus Rosé – Portugal’s most famous export before Cristiano Ronaldo – determined the path of taste for pink wines.

When the wine world got all fussed about fruity wines daring to reflect their origin lying in what is a ripe, sugar-laden fruit called “grape”, general tastes ran drier. Hence the proliferation of dry rosés over the past two decades, most claiming to be inspired by the heartland of rosé wines and their culture, namely sunny, sexy, lavender-strewn fields, faux Van Gogh prints and George Clooney-occupied Provence.

However, within the offering of dry rosés lies another distinction, namely between pink wines that run flinty, herbaceous and bone-dry and those that, while still limited in the sugar-holding department, present a generosity in flavour and palate weight, as if, before pressing, the juice had been allowed to draw taste and structure from the red skins. No, not more time before the pressing of the grapes, as these rosés are still marked with the light shade of onion skin, revealing a scarcity of skin contact. It’s just as if the rosés have a depth of flavour a few steps above the less revealing Provençal styles.

These generous rosés, with their intriguing taste-delivering brushwork and revealing aromatic complexity, appear mostly to be made from Pinotage. During her tenure of terror as head of South Africa’s generic wine marketing body, WOSA, Su Birch reckoned that rosé was the only decent thing that could be made from Pinotage. Although a sharpish and naïve comment, Pinotage does do rosé well, as a couple of Cape cellars have shown. Kanonkop, for one.

The initial inspiration for using Pinotage for rosé came about on the slopes of the Simonsberg, there at Delheim Estate. In 1976, paterfamilias Spatz Sperling was still very much in control and – true to the tune of the wine industry – sat with a problem. South Africa was experiencing a hell of a glut of red grapes and wine, the situation not helped by the economic sanctions the rest of the world was imposing on the country’s products due to apartheid. Gold and diamonds were obviously not boycotted due to their desirability and necessity, but wine and fruit – verboten.

In any event, sitting with an unusable mound of Pinotage grapes, Spatz’s sidekick in the cellar, one Otto Hellmar, suggested using the Pinotage to make a rosé. There was no other Pinotage rosé being made, and with more than enough red wine to go around in the local market, a rosé offered an alternative proposition, while still utilising red grapes.

Thus, the country’s first Pinotage Rosé was made under the Delheim label from the 1976 vintage, and records show it was an immediate success. Back then the wine was slightly sweeter than it is today, and with his pink bow tie and vivacious personality, Spatz would tour the country each year, introducing the new vintage to wine drinkers, restaurateurs and hotel owners. Spatz and his mate Frans Malan from Simonsig would have an annual competition to see who could get their respective new vintages onto the market first, with Delheim’s Pinotage Rosé competing against the Simonsig Chenin Blanc for a claim to top honours.

Today, this rosé still shows a characteristic house style of Delheim. The colour has also lightened up over the years, from an initial undergarment-pink satin shade to a whisper of salmon. The nose is inviting and bears heady aromas of grapes, granite and fynbos, being possibly the most convincing evidence of Pinotage’s underrated aromatic components.

Always served chilled to the max, Delheim Pinotage Rosé offers delight and satisfaction from the first mouthful – rosé is never sipped; it is taken in thirsty draughts. Crisp and zesty, layers of dark and red berries gallivant about the mouth, the senses elevated by pheromone-activating shafts of oyster shell, wild olive and dried buchu.

Rosé might not receive the scores, comments and tributes red and white wines do, but for the thirsty and keen wine drinker, a good pink alone bears more than enough in its sheer presence in the mouth. And on the senses.

Even the wisest philosophers have never found a name for it: that irresistible longing to step into a painting and make a home inside its world. At times I have to fight the urge. Show me one of Paul Gauguin’s canvases, ablaze with impossible, dazzling colours and scented with the languid tropical air of Tahiti, and I want to climb through the frame. To pluck a ripe mango between the brushstrokes and walk barefoot along an endless beach of burnished gold.

One of David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings can make me kick off my shoes on the coldest winter’s day, ready to dive into that crystal water, slipping through those precise geometric lines into the depths of sapphire blue.

It is a yearning born of dreams. Yet, every so often, dreams find a way of becoming real to the point of tactile. And we have people who are seldom compared to artists to thank for this: the farmer.

For what else could the landscape between Caledon and Napier in the Overberg be but a work of art? The winter wheat stands verdant and lush, a luxuriant emerald sea stretching to the horizon, its untamed expanse interrupted only by gentle hills rising from the earth in graceful curves.

Beside the wheat lie fields of canola, blazing in the brightest yellow imaginable, thousands upon thousands of blooms glittering like stars that have drifted down from a Chinese night sky. Above these broad swathes of butter-yellow flowers and the undulating carpet of green wheat arches an endless blue sky, vast and silent.

I find myself wondering who could ever paint such perfection, capturing the precise moment when earth, light and growing things come together before my eyes. But no answer is needed. You have seen it as it is, and in that instant the vision belongs to you alone.

Winter also casts its own revealing light on the quiet wonders wrought by the winegrower. At Diemersdal in Durbanville, the vines stand bare, their spirit at rest as they gather strength for the awakening of spring. Their shoots have been pruned with purpose so that the coming bunches will set true, and the vineyard rows are etched across the lush green cover crop with almost military precision. Beneath each vine, the grey-brown earth beckons — fragments of rock broken apart hundreds of millions of years ago, now cradling the roots that are the lifeblood of the vine.

Watch as a veil of silver cloud settles above the neatly pruned vineyards in the late afternoon. The sinking western sun spills strokes of orange and crimson across the landscape. What the farmer has created here surpasses art itself.

Farther north, beyond the Piekenierskloof Pass, the valley of Citrusdal bursts into colour as orange trees proudly display their brilliant fruit. The trees are sturdy, crowned with generous domes of foliage as green as an Irish dream. The saffron-hued oranges bring light and joy to the landscape, so much so that even the unforgiving rock faces of the surrounding mountains seem to gaze down with a smile.

Perhaps farmers live inside these paintings every day. Perhaps that is why they do what they do. But every time I return, I find myself appreciating them anew: the creators of nature’s greatest masterpieces.

The brilliant bon vivant and American writer Jim Harrison claimed that man was not put on this earth to consume small portions. But then again, Jim did not stick around long enough to experience Ozempic.

Because, as the past six weeks of personal experience has shown, Ozempic plays God, having turned my once ravenous following of the Jim Harrison doctrine into one whose appetite for food and drink has taken on monistic proportions – although the donning of a sack-cloth habit and the urge to embark on the inspired chanting of hymns has yet to take shape.

But man, if a weekly jab of Ozempic can make me drive past Peregrine Farm Stall in Elgin without even thinking of pulling over for a pepper-steak pie, anything is possible.

Cutting to the chase, Ozempic – like other GLP-1 drugs such as Mounjaro – suppresses the desire to consume food and drink. That is just simply it. You eat and drink less. Not only does one feel sated after a few bites or sips, but the dopamine hit attached to the primal senses being bombarded by a slice of pizza Napoletana with added chilli or a long, cool glug of buttery Chardonnay disappears.

The long-term effects are, hopefully, the lowering of blood sugar and cholesterol as well as shedding a few kilograms. Ozempic, thus, is not rocket science. No banting, seawater enemas, Mediterranean dieting, 18-hour fasts or – heaven forbid – veganism. It just makes you do what your mum or Grandma always told you were the tricks to eating healthy, and that is to eat less.

This it does. As well as, and here the subject of wine comes in, limiting your urge to drink. Not only wine or other alcohol, by the way. Because of the constant sated feeling the drugs cause, downing my recommended two litres of water has become a slog, one akin to what a foie gras goose must experience thrice daily. I am also not washing down snacks of nuts and dry fruit with a pint of milk in the late-afternoon, as the desire for snacks of any kind has gone walkabout, drifting somewhere in outer space, hoping for its master to retrieve his hunger and lust for internal sensorial gratification.

So, if millions of wine-loving Ozempic and Mounjaro users are – like me – drinking less, I’ll go out on the shrinking limb and state that GLP-1s must be a reason why alcohol consumption is tanking worldwide. This insightful observation was vindicated recently while doing a wine-tasting for a bunch of Texans, with seven of the 20 admitting to jabbing GLP-1s and subsequently experiencing a decline in their consumption of Napa Valley Cabernet, Cognac and – as the lady from Houston said – “even fucking goddamn Dom Perignon!”

In my case, it started about a day after my first Ozempic needle, six weeks back. The initial experience was slight indigestion, with the feeling of having a wind sitting in your stomach making the body just feel, well, full and slightly bloated from the inside. Despite forcing down a can of baked beans, the wind was not expelled from any of the body’s two orifices normally reserved for such occasions, hanging around for about three days and making me feel constantly full. For the first time since my days of bland school-dinners in grey English afternoons, with the teachers watching your plate, I had to force myself to eat. Glasses of wine poured from habit, were half-emptied or – as the case on one depressing Tuesday evening – left untouched.

This was truly weird, as not only was I lacking any desire to eat, but the usual interest in the topic of food had vacated the body and soul. Not even a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson nibbling on a whole cylinder of cannelloni pasta could evoke a sense of culinary lust.

Things got better on the fourth day after the first Ozempic hit. At lunch at a sushi joint, I attacked the first sashimi and nigiri pieces with the usual gusto, but after five pieces the chopsticks were put down leaving the rest of the 16-piece sushi special in undisturbed peace, bright and colourful. I finished the glass of Sauvignon Blanc, refusing the refill and causing my usual waitress, Usurpia, to stare at me with a look veering between shock and worry.

Accordingly, the rhythm of the domestic evenings has changed. Dinners are cooked in copious amounts, but one helping of a modest portion is enough for me. In pre-Ozempic days, a languidly consumed large plate of osso buco followed by another smaller second helping and some baguette to mop-up the meaty sauces, would require at least three glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon to accompany the gusto of pleasurable eating.

Now, a single glass at dinner is ample, followed – maybe – by another while ensuring the Ozempic pen has been but back into the fridge and uncoiling your blood-pressure monitor.

While bottles were opened and emptied on a nightly basis, half-empty vessels are now recorked and placed in the refrigerator for later use.

Fortunately, the lesser volume of consumption has not interfered with the enjoyment of wine. In fact, my scientifically unsubstantiated yet personally experienced observation is that Ozempic has heightened my sensorial abilities. Like a Master of Wine candidate or a contributor to Platter’s Guide, I am able to detect layers of aromatic and flavour complexities in wines that I did not know existed. I can grasp onto the slightest hint of a sorrel sharpness in a Chablis, uncoil it from the rest of the flavours and ponder on this persuasive element’s meaning to the wine.

A glass of Médoc is not glugged down with a mouthful of rib-eye. Now it is examined, each component unpacked to stand before me screaming for identification and affirmation of grape and place, requests I honour in words, dreams and letters.

Portions may whither, but the appetite stays the same.