It’s not all that frequently that, in my modesty, I concur with the awards made by judges at the many wine competitions gracing the South African wine making scene.
Their hard and honest labours tend to produce lists that have (in my opinion) little more or less plausibility than would be produced by a more random process.
One reason these usually skilled panels get so much wrong is that the number of wines they are required to judge is simply too large for most people’s palates and powers of concentration to cope with under the pretty rushed conditions (a good sniff and a swirl around a mouth still echoing with the previous swirly is what most wines get).
Perhaps, if I’m right in this, the reason the tasters in the recent Green Wine Awards so astutely came up with brilliant Reyneke as their star winery in the organic wine category was because they had to deal with a mere 50 wines of different colours and styles.
The small entry suggests, incidentally, that there’s little marketing clout in the idea of organic wine, not enough to compensate for the difficulties involved in green farming.
The competition category is officially, in fact, the more unwieldy “Best Wine from Organically Grown Grapes”, reflecting the fact that it is, in most international regimes, not the wine-making procedure that can be certified as organic, but rather the viticulture.
Reyneke took the red wine award with its Reserve Red 2007, a delicately smooth, lively, sophisticated (and, at about R320, pricey) wine made mostly from shiraz.
The winning white wine was the Chenin Blanc 2009, which Reyneke makes for Woolworths, also not cheap at R125.
Both scored four stars in Wine magazine’s system (the magazine was “associated” with the awards, which are sponsored by the appropriately green-branded Nedbank).
The sweet wine award went to Stellar for its Heaven on Earth (a mere R55). Another 2009 wine from Reyneke, simply called Reserve White, also rated four stars.
It is one of a small number of Cape sauvignons made in mostly new oak barrels (most sauvignon is vinified in stainless steel tanks) and it is undoubtedly among the country’s best from this fashionable variety.
The Reyneke family bought the farm on Stellenbosch’s Polkadraai Hills in 1988, initially delivering wine to a co-op. But young Johan Reyneke was struck by the contradiction of his studying environmental philosophy while helping his mother to spray the vines with pesticides.
Against financial and other difficulties, Johan persevered in transforming the farm to organic farming and in 2001 Reyneke’s first organic pinotage was produced. Soon the farm was in official conversion to complete organic production.
Johan went further — much further than a sceptic like me could follow without bursting into laughter and tears — into the lurid, moonlit thickets of “biodynamic” mumbo jumbo, of cow horns buried in the corners of vineyards, of cosmic forces and of homeopathic treatments stirred in a clockwise (I think) direction to invoke vortices of energy.
“The magic of nature”, Johan calls it (and he’s a man so thoroughly nice that I have reason to hope he’ll forgive my unspiritual rudeness), but he does admit to the “creative tension” of being pulled between “magic” and science.
He loves his vines and wisely leaves the wine-making to others. The results, at least, are magic enough.