Spots from the sky: remains of ancient termite nests in the Swartland.
A termite mound is usually associated with the parched, hard and hot regions of Southern Africa, a strange bulging citadel of soil with countless pale insects seething within. Despite no longer found in the Cape Winelands, this ancient builder of underground worlds may be one of the grapevine’s oldest friends.
We think of termites as inhabitants of the country’s northern savannas, those dry landscapes dotted with russet towers. But thousands of years ago, they thrived across the lands we now call the Cape winelands. Their trace, however, endures. In the remains of millions of insects themselves as well as in the quiet architecture they left behind.
My first encounter with this notion that termite activity once shaped the very soils of our vineyards, came from Danie de Wet of De Wetshof Estate in Robertson. Robertson’s earth carries the highest limestone content of any South African wine region. Chalk and Chardonnay have always been intimate companions, and it is no coincidence that De Wetshof’s luminous Chardonnays found their natural home here. Danie believes the valley’s calcareous richness was forged by countless ancient termite colonies: generations of insects lived, worked, died, their remains enriching the ground, softening it, whitening it.
These fossilised termite mounds, it turns out, are scattered far beyond Robertson. Johann Smit, one of South Africa’s most seasoned viticulturists, known for his tenure at Spier and now at Perdeberg Wines, has long been fascinated by them. Travelling between the vineyards that feed Perdeberg’s wines, Johann began to notice a pattern: circular patches, faintly discernible from the air, particularly between Malmesbury and Darling. To the farmer’s eye, they’re called heuweltjies or kraaltjies – little hillocks, or small enclosures, like ghostly livestock kraals waiting for a flock that never came.
With the mind of a true soil scientist, Johann began to dig deeper, both literally and figuratively. What he discovered was astonishing: these termite kraaltjies have a fundamentally different chemistry from the land around them. For millennia, termites carried organic material such as leaves, stems, bark and animal dung into their underground fortresses. The surrounding earth, stripped of its organic surface litter, became poorer, while the mounds themselves grew rich with carbon and minerals. The termites, in their anonymous persistence, were the first tillers of the Cape soil.
The remains of their work still speak through the spade. The soil of a kraaltjie is soft, friable, almost yielding, while the earth beside it is hard as baked clay. Within the mound zones, levels of potassium, calcium, magnesium, boron, and carbon rise sharply, and the pH is markedly higher. What the termite once built for shelter has become, aeons later, a cradle for the vine.
And vines do respond. Johann, with enthusiasm of reverence awe, describes how plants growing on these circles are different: their foliage denser, their canopy casting more shade, their leaves persisting nearly a month longer after harvest than their neighbours. This, he notes, allows the vine to store greater reserves for the following season, a quiet promise of renewal written into the life of the plant.
Such reverence for these subterranean artisans found its natural expression in a wine: Kraaltjies Chenin Blanc 2025, made from 34-year-old bush vines rooted squarely in these ancient mounds. “You can see the difference in the grapes,” says Johann. “The bunches are larger, the acids brighter as the shade keeps the ripening bunches cool.” To preserve the purity of this termite terroir, the wine was left unoaked, resting four months on its lees before bottling.
Does the ghost of the termite truly whisper in the glass? Perhaps that lies beyond analysis. What can be said is that Kraaltjies Chenin Blanc is another shining example of Swartland Chenin, lovely broad-shouldered yet supple, fragrant with blossom, generous in fruit, and touched by something quietly primeval.
Wine, after all, is not only judged by what it is, but by the story that leads to it. The dialogue between earth and time. In this case, the story reaches back to an age before man, when the first architects of the soil were still at work. Their mounds have crumbled, but their legacy endures tasted now, centuries later, in a glass of Chenin Blanc.