RIP Cape Sherry

And then, not a word. The mountains still echo with the bewildered murmurs over the demise of Afrikaans newspapers, yet not a single voice in that or any other community makes mention of another South African treasure that has quietly disappeared over the past year or so, namely the once proud Cape wine known as sherry.

Where the country was in years past globally regarded as the only one whose sherry quality could be spoken of in the same breath as those from the wine’s birthplace, namely in the vicinity of Jerez de la Frontera in Spain’s warm south, the local wine industry has silently turned off the sherry tap. Now the Cape has lost a once proud part of its wine history. The shelves where sherry once stood are bare, the reason being – just like with the decline of newspapers – that its production is no longer deemed financially viable.

South Africa produced this magnificent wine for the first time in 1933, though it had been adored worldwide for hundreds of years due to its captivating combination of flavours, including nuts, dried fruit, and salt, presented in various styles from syrupy sweet to bone-dry. The secret lies in the flor yeast that must rest like a dense mouldy blanket on the wine to impart those complex flavours and lingering mouthfeel. It was not until the aforementioned 1933 that KWV’s legendary wine genius Charlie Niehaus discovered this yeast in a vineyard in Stellenbosch. Vergenoegd, no less.

The success was immediate. The Cape’s soil types and climate, especially the warm areas of Worcester, Swartland, and Robertson, create ideal conditions for producing grapes as close to those of Spanish character as a Breedekloof drum majorette is to a flamenco dancer. Suddenly, Cape sherry was in high demand internationally, especially in England where the delightful consumption of a few glasses of dry sherry before noon was considered mandatory in whetting the appetite.

There are still British television segments showing how hundreds of millions of litres of sherry were exported from South Africa to England in the 1960s and 1970s, with experts at the time suggesting that the Spaniards should watch out because, in terms of quality, the Cape sherries were breathing down their necks.

Local sherry lovers could still experience the splendour until a few years ago through the quality wines that KWV and Monis continued to bottle. But then, like mist before the sun, everything disappeared. Monis stopped filling its well-known translucent sherry bottles – the good stuff being blended away with that innocuous faecal coloured liquor known as Old Brown. Any reference to sherry vanished from KWV’s extensive wine list.

And so, a chapter of the country’s wine industry is hereby closed. To those who had the foresight to fill their cellars with bottles full of these offerings from the Cape’s vineyard treasure, may you be blessed. Enjoy every drop to the end of days, yet do raise the occasional glass to the rest of us who sit with dry mouths. Droëbek being the operative word.