What a difference a decade has made for Nederburg.
Long South Africa’s best-known brand both locally and internationally and the mighty flagship of Distell, 10 years ago it was a lacklustre affair, looking for prestige to its annual auction and the great sweet wines of the past. The South African wine revolution was passing Nederburg by.
Earlier this week the 2011 edition of the annual Platter’s wine guide was launched. As its editor, Philip van Zyl, remarked to me, choosing the Winery of the Year was a no-brainer.
Five Nederburg wines had been given the guide’s highest accolade, five stars — a remarkable record number and approaching 10% of this year’s five-star winners.
In the bad old days the 2001 Platter’s had awarded four stars to a mere half dozen or so of Nederburg’s wines. That number steadily increased and this year 22 rated that or higher.
Achievement at the lower level was marked by the tasting panel voting the Lyric white blend “superquaffer” of the year for its combination of low price and high drinkability.
Platter’s is also a big ship in its own way and it is testimony to the guide’s nimble responsiveness that it has continuously responded to the steady improvement in Nederburg quality and shown marked enthusiasm for some new wines, such as the red and white blends in the Ingenuity range.
Both Ingenuity White 2009 and Red 2007 received five-star ratings — the white hasn’t missed out in its three vintages. Two of the other five-star Nederburgs are sweet — the standard Noble Late Harvest and the famous Edelkeur (both 2009). The fifth is the 2009 Sauvignon Blanc-Chardonnay Private Bin D253.
More importantly for wine lovers is the transformation across the gamut of Nederburg wines, from the Auction Reserve and Ingenuity ranges through Manor House and Wine-master’s Reserve to the more modest pleasures of the big-volume Foundation range.
All 14-million litres of the stuff — the bottling line runs continuously during working hours, filling 4 000 bottles an hour.
So what happened at Nederburg’s Paarl HQ to make this possible? This is a large and complex machine, but it’s tempting to seek the individual genius and there’s fortunately one to hand. Razvan Macici, Nederburg’s Romanian-born cellarmaster, arrived almost exactly a decade ago and has presided over the change with benign authority, charm and immense skill. But the Distell overlords who were clever and lucky enough to appoint him did provide him with a new cellar and useful support.
He gives credit, too, to his senior winemakers (of whom Zimbabwean Tariro Masayati, the self-styled “black white winemaker”, has served longest). But Macici leads, as is clear when he shows me around the section of the massive Nederburg complex where the label’s most ambitious wines are created.
Here the fermenting tanks and holding vessels are ridiculously tiny compared with the towers of stainless steel in which the standard wines are made.
In the huge Distell economy Macici’s top wines must be in themselves irrelevant (and I tasted more, even finer, wines that are yet to be released). But as a signal of renewed pride and of the quality increasingly associated with the revived Nederburg brand, they are potent, eloquent.
The 2011 Platter’s South African Wines (in which Tim James declares an interest as a taster and an associate editor) should be widely available shortly at R160