They called it a revolution. No walls were breached or regimes toppled, and the liquid spilt wasn’t blood, it was red wine. But what red wine…
In the Noughties a bunch of young winemakers became enthused by the amazingly varied soils and altitudes of the Swartland, a large, hot swathe of South Africa’s hinterland 45 minutes north of Cape Town. They found hitherto neglected vineyards (and planted others), fermented the grapes with naturally occurring yeasts and intervened as little as possible. The wines were so gorgeous that many people, like me, who had loved South African whites but few reds, were obliged to change their minds. And changing hearts and minds is, surely, the point of a revolution.
South Africa has been producing wine since the 1650s, but initially only in Constantia and Stellenbosch. By the time political isolation ended with apartheid, in the early 1990s, the co-operatives that had made more than 90 per cent of the country’s wine, and focused primarily on quantity, were losing their power and quality-focused private wineries were appearing.
In 1999 the Swartland Revolution began when Eben Sadie set up Sadie Family Wines amid a sea of wheat. Soon he had company: young adventurers who, like him, had learnt from older makers and were ready to try doing things differently. Adi Badenhorst, white-bearded but boyish, has the energy and charm you need to create a bohemian oasis (complete with pizza oven on the shady veranda) in a place that looked, when he arrived, “like the Gobi Desert”. His glorious wines include single-vineyard cinsaults and Raaigras, from the country’s oldest grenache plot, which has a lovely violet note and a freshness that comes, he says, from the granite soils: “Grenache is one of those grapes that listens to where it’s planted.”
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