Читать книгу Wines of the New South Africa - Tim James - Страница 10

INTRODUCTION

What is South African wine? Rather, ask first: what are South African vineyards, and what do they mean?

Inland from the Atlantic, some three hours’ drive from Cape Town, we eventually found the farm called ’t Voetpad—an old Dutch name meaning “the footpath.” The landscape is mountainous, beautiful but hard, with few signs of habitation. Wheat and rooibos tea are the main agricultural pursuits. But at the end of one of the large valleys, next to a homestead, an ancient barn, and a cluster of trees, was the neglected vineyard about which an ambitious winemaker, looking for old vines, had learned.

The nearest vineyards to this are far away, across at least a mountain or two. These few hectares of tangled vines were mostly planted some one hundred years back. They grow as untrellised “bushvines,” with no irrigation despite heat and little rain. Though planted after the phylloxera infestation had laid waste the Cape’s vineyards in the late nineteenth century, requiring almost universal replanting with resistant rootstocks, these vines grow on their own roots: this was too remote a corner, perhaps, for the insect to bother with. In other ways, too, this vineyard could have been planted three hundred years ago. The half-dozen grape varieties growing here in random promiscuity were already established in the early years of the Dutch East India Company’s little settlement at the foot of Africa.

Rationally, the vineyard should have been uprooted years ago, but the farmer’s mother felt sentimental about it, so the vines were dutifully if minimally maintained and the grapes sold for a pittance to the nearest cooperative winery, where they disappeared into some nameless, cheap blend. But why were they planted in the first place, so obscurely, so isolated from any obvious market? This was surely not originally a commercial vineyard, but rather one of a type that must have been, for a few hundred years, scattered across the old Cape Colony: planted to make wine for domestic consumption and to sell to neighboring farms. In the early twentieth century the notorious “tot system” was still widely and unembarrassedly used by landowners, who doled out frequent rations of liquor to their farmworkers (descendants of slaves and the indigenous population) as part of a system of low pay and social control. Other farmers within easy reach by ox-drawn wagon would have also wanted wine for their laborers and themselves—no doubt it was a useful source of nutrition, too, as wine was for the peasants of old Europe.

This rare old vineyard, which evokes so much of the history of the Cape wine lands, has been saved for now, and finds a fascinating expression in a wine.

Closer to the heartland of the South African wine industry, there’s another unirrigated vineyard of bushvines where I have stood and wondered. It is on the slopes of the Paardeberg, a granitic mountain with trailing skirts of vineyards, that rises suddenly among wheat lands and under the enormous skies of the Swartland. Although the summer sun is hot, cool breezes reach from the Atlantic some twenty kilometers away. There were already farms hereabouts by the end of the seventeenth century, one of them granted to a French Huguenot escaping religious persecution in Europe, but these large vineyards of Chenin Blanc were mostly planted in the 1960s to feed the brandy industry and a new market for fruity white wines recently made possible by cold-fermentation technology. Now many low-yielding old vines are scarcely viable commercially, and most are being ripped up and replaced. These gnarled vines are most carefully tended, however, and their wine goes into a highly regarded white blend, of a new and uniquely South African type.

To an unsympathetic observer this is a scruffy, scrubby, and unlovely vineyard, not to be compared with what can be observed on an adjacent hillside. There, vines in trellised rows are lush and deep green in the bright light under cloudless midsummer January skies—also Chenin Blanc, but young and vigorous vines of a high-yielding clone, irrigated and intelligently farmed with all the resources of well-capitalized modern agriculture and the unstinting (though expensive) support of the agrochemical industry. The grapes are sold to a wholesaler to make unexceptionable wine at a low price, mostly for the supermarket shelves of Europe.

There are few scruffy, dry vineyards that I am aware of in the long, broad inland valley of the Breede River. Endless stretches of the other kind may be found, though, with high-yielding vineyards vastly outnumbering the few farmed to produce high-quality wine. Growing vigorously in alluvial soils, these vines would not survive long in the heat without copious irrigation; they would not look as lavish and rich as this, so heavily laden with large bunches of luscious grapes, without water pumped from the river and its dams, without chemical controls for the diseases that breed in those thick canopies of leaves. The spaces between the rows of vines are blasted clean with herbicide, and down them move the tractors and the mechanical harvesters.

In the Stellenbosch region, we find vineyards that are also mostly fairly young at one of the grandest properties there—although vines have been planted on the farm, and wine has been made, for more than three hundred years, since an early Cape governor established a huge estate and fine homestead for himself. There is still splendor and high expenditure, as the estate is a showpiece of a major multinational company, but there’s even greater determination to make the best possible wine. These vineyards are more closely monitored than most in the country, and among the few that can be claimed to be free of the damaging leafroll virus, rampant in South Africa. The price of that freedom is continual vigilance; any vine showing signs of developing virus is pulled up, destroyed, and replaced. But the vines are not the only vegetation here—even Stellenbosch is not quite a vinous monoculture. The alien vegetation that, along with modern agricultural industry and urban expansion, threatens the Western Cape’s incomparably rich indigenous plant life is itself being systematically attacked on the 3,500-hectare estate. The reestablishment of indigenous vegetation, and its penetration up to and sometimes right into the vineyards, seems to be playing a part in eliminating pesticide applications and dramatically reducing fungicide and herbicide use on these vineyards.

In the less imposing, bleaker landscape of Elim the wind seems to blow unceasingly. Here, near the southernmost tip of Africa, scattered vineyards have been planted. For a while, long ago, there were some vines grown by Moravian missionaries at their station, which took in freed slaves after 1838, but all those one can see now were planted after 1992. That was the year when, at long last, the authorities abandoned the system that imposed quotas on production, which effectively prevented the opening up of new winegrowing areas. Now some of the country’s best Sauvignon Blanc comes from these vineyards, where the vines must struggle against voracious grape-predating birds as well as the cool, but often vicious, salt-laden winds off the oceans that meet at Cape Agulhas.

With all this diversity of origin, and not even taking into account how the grapes are turned into wine, one must be reluctant to make easy generalizations about “South African wine.” The multifariousness of wine comes primarily from two elements other than different vine varieties: the land and the human beings who have interacted with it. In winegrowing terms they have been doing so for more than 350 years, since roots of the Eurasian vine Vitis vinifera were first brought here, to be planted and tended by smallholders, servants, and slaves. All these landscapes and all these vineyards (just a few of which have been sketched above) have a human history as well as a natural one. As vineyards, they are where they are, and how they are, because of human decisions and actions. The land can speak through that history and express diversity—unless it is muted by farming that has no interest in nuance, or muted by sheer ignorance of how best to let it speak. Learning the language of the land is part of the adventure of the most ambitious South African winegrowers today.

But the landscape is physically and conceptually shaped by human culture—and increasingly by an international culture, for what is grown here at the foot of Africa, and how it is grown, is partly shaped by the decisions of, say, supermarket buyers in Amsterdam and Berlin and grander importers in New York and London.

The past too is part of the informing fabric of the present. When it comes to the simple question of old vines, that is a good thing; and another good thing about modern South African wine is the persistence of some of the independent traditions and understandings established though the decades of international isolation. These—the best of them at least—mean that there is something different about good South African wines, a difference culturally as well as geographically informed.

More troubling elements of the past also persist. The land was appropriated in the first place, to have new ideas of ownership thrust upon it and upon those who had long been using it for pasture and hunting. Later, when many people around the world refused to drink South African wine because they could taste in it the bitterness of apartheid, they were not wrong. Looking closely at the vineyards I have sketched above, one can observe that above all they are all possessions, and their owners are all white men, or multinational corporations redolent of established power. One can observe that most of those who work on them, harvesting in the heat and pruning winter vines with cold hands, are black or—given the subtleties of racial classification achieved here—“colored,” people of mixed race in the Western Cape, descendants of imported slaves, of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San people, and of the Europeans who settled here, and ruled and destroyed and created, starting in 1652.

All this history; all this beauty of mountain, valley, and space (as so many have observed, there is no wine land anywhere more lovely than the Cape); all this complexity; and all this potential is in the vineyards. It is a landscape and a diversity worth exploring—physically, intellectually, and, above all in the context of wine, sensually.

A note on Southern Hemisphere vineyard seasons: Harvesttime in South Africa varies according to the local specificities of the climate, of course, as well as depending on the variety (and to an extent on the philosophy of the winegrower). In the warmest parts it is likely to start in early midsummer, often in late January. February is generally the hottest month. By the end of March, summer might have an autumnal touch, and most farmers will have already brought in their crops, but in cooler parts the grapes will still be ripening and picking will linger at least through April. In May, winter is definitely approaching, the rainy season in the Cape (with any luck some rain will already have fallen on the exhausted vines in dryland areas). Pruning will follow in winter, July and August, and within another month or two the new growth will be greening the vineyards. By November, myriad tiny flowers will show the shape of the bunches of grapes to come.