At the end of a long, hot valley somewhere inland from Elands Bay on the Cape West Coast, a few untidy hectares of vines are lost among the wheat, rooibos tea and bleakness. All are old, and one section of them, planted in 1900, among the oldest in the country.
This vineyard must surely have been originally planted for table grapes and to provide wine for the farmer and, with the notorious dop system, probably his labourers too. More recently the vineyard was kept up by farmer Dirk Brand largely for sentimental reasons, and the grapes disappeared into the huge anonymous vats of a cooperative winery. Now two of the country’s priciest and rarest wines are being made from these vines — part of a collection of six wines from old vineyards being made by Sadie Family, a small, prestigious winery based in the southern Swartland. The maiden vintage is being released about now.
Last November with winemaker Eben Sadie and viticulturist Rosa Kruger, I visited these “amazing sites”, as Sadie reverentially calls them, for the second time.
(I have been interested and involved in his project, although with no commercial connections).
This time we took with us the artist William Kentridge. As a winelover and a friend of mine since we were involved in student politics in the heady mid-1970s, Kentridge had let me interest him in Sadie’s project, and was intending to produce artwork that could be used for labels, once the wine finally got into bottles.
In his studio, Kentridge later made a set of inkwash drawings and collages, some based closely on photographs of the vineyards and surrounding country, some more mediated representations of humanised landscapes — old pruning shears dominating the scene, a woman with the blades of an old windmill for a head, an old bushvine in trousers, striding through the vineyard.
If wines can evoke history and culture, these strive to do precisely that — as well as, of course, to be delicious and interesting, which they are. What Sadie calls “the mystery of the old vine” is in them. They also draw attention to the value of old, obscure and largely forgotten vineyards, which are irrelevant to the needs of mainstream commercial wine production. The grape varieties might be unfashionable (like cinsaut, one of those used here), and yields are usually too abysmally low to justify the costs of maintaining the vines unless the farmer can get a commensurate price.
The old vineyards that survive generally do so because of the pride — and even love — of their owners, but more and more are pulled out each year. Sometimes cost-saving has, ironically, been useful in helping farmers resist the temptation of the poisons and potions of the agrochemical industry — no herbicides and chemical fertilisers have been used in the Old Vineyard Series vines.
As to the making of the wines, back in Sadie’s cellar on the slopes of the Paardeberg, this is done with utmost simplicity, in much the same way as a few hundred years ago (give or take a bit of air conditioning). A crucial difference, of course, is the modern understanding and control of the processes. The juice of the crushed grapes was fermented with natural yeasts in old wooden casks. There the wines remained until they were siphoned off to bottles, with no fining or filtering — the only radical intervention being the traditional and essential addition of a little sulphur. The wines speak directly, to those who listen, of their origins.
The landscapes that Kentridge has drawn over the years have always shown profound responsiveness to the history of the land, its “unnatural” appropriation and annexation to the socioeconomic structures of human need and power.
Most of the drawings on the wine labels (which, incidentally, Kentridge did not do the designs of himself) have historicality built into their very structure: they were created on ruled and headed sheets from the ledgers on which retailers were formerly obliged to record all sales of “intoxicating liquor”, as a part of state control.
The wines are being sold in sets comprising all six wines, so the total number of cases is limited to how many bottles there are of the lowest-volume wine each year. For the maiden 2009 vintage, this was the 280 bottles of the wine called Kokerboom, which is drawn from a small block of semillon bushvines planted, it is thought, in the 1930s. The six-bottle case costs nearly R4 000.
Why make a fuss over a handful of wines that few could afford even if they could locate them, and very few genuine aficionados will even get to sip? Because, quite apart from the elitism that unfortunately and only too inevitably intrudes, there is a truth that should be important to all lovers of South African wine, as well as to all who resist obliteration of a past that had some aspects of positive value — simply that, as Sadie says, “our old vineyards are a part of our national heritage”, and we should find ways of saving them. And relish, even abstractly, their bottled mystery.