The Elegance of Age: Tasting South Africa’s Oldest Vines

By Alder Yarrow

View the original article here.

Old vines make better wines. Like so many broad generalizations in the wine industry, that’s a verifiably false statement. Plenty of bad wine gets made from old vines all over the world.

However, it can confidently and unequivocally be said that older vines bring something special to the wines they produce. In the hands of a competent grower and winemaker, ancient vines produce wines with qualities unattainable by younger vines, no matter how well-tended.

Balance and complexity are perhaps the two most often cited characteristics of fruit (and wines) made from very old vines. Farmers will often speak of vines’ resilience and their seeming self-regulation in the face of whatever the vintage throws at them.

Some winemakers swear that all other things being equal, older vines naturally ripen and produce more flavor at lower sugar levels than younger vines. Others simply shrug and say, “they’re different.”

Du Bois Boerdery, Chenin Blanc planted in 1966, Stellenbosch. Photo by Danie Nel.

Having tasted wines made from older vines and younger vines from the same site (same vintage, same winemaking protocols) I can say that my anecdotal experience supports the claim that there’s something special and more complex about wines made from older vines, provided they’re made with care.

That’s why I go out of my way to taste old-vine wines whenever I get the opportunity.

On my recent press trip to South Africa, I spent almost an entire day at the Cape Wine 2022 tradeshow seeking out and tasting wines from some of the country’s oldest vineyard sites.

I scampered around the massive trade show floor, raising a few eyebrows when I showed up at various booths asking to taste one and only one of their wines, and then after a word of thanks, dashing to the next booth. It was great fun.

In this endeavor, I was also helped by the folks at the Old Vines Project, who had a booth where one could taste 15 or 20 old-vine wines at a sitting, and who also have a web database listing 292 old-vine wines from South Africa that can be sorted and filtered by their vineyard planting dates among other criteria.

The Old Vine Project

Viticulturalist Rosa Kruger, the founder of the Old Vine Project, came to her chosen craft first by way of journalism, an unfinished legal degree, and apple farming. After being told in 1998 that the farm where she was living might be suitable for grapevines, she persuaded some viticulture professors at Stellenbosch University to give her some pointers, and launched herself into growing wine grapes.

Essentially self-taught, Kruger was not only successful enough with her own vineyards to encourage a newfound passion, she rapidly found that others were willing to pay her for assistance with their plots of vines. While spending some time working as a viticulturalist for several other South African wine estates, Kruger was asked in 2002 by Stellenbosch University to help them catalog the oldest vineyards in the country.

By 2005, word had gotten out about the ‘old-vine lady’ and Kruger was getting calls from farmers and wineries wanting to let her know about their old plots of vines. Around this time, a young winemaker named Eben Sadie was getting ready to strike out on his own, and he had a vision for making wines from old, heritage vineyards. Kruger pointed him to some of the best sites she knew, and in 2006, Sadie debuted his “Mev Kirsten” Chenin Blanc to an unprecedented level of critical acclaim.

Other winemakers soon followed in Sadie’s footsteps, beating a path to Kruger’s door and leaving with phone numbers for growers and their gnarled old vines. As farmers learned that the young winemakers dispatched by Kruger were willing to pay much higher sums for grapes than the local co-op, Kruger learned of still more vineyard sites, many neglected and barely alive.

In the knotted arms of these ancient vines, Kruger found her true calling.

In 2014 Kruger launched a website attempting to catalog South Africa’s oldest vineyard sites that quickly morphed into the official Old Vine Project, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to saving and preserving South Africa’s old vineyards.

By 2018, with the help of a philanthropic grant, the organization launched the world’s first heritage vineyard certification program, which permits South African wineries that own verified old vines to use an official seal on their bottles indicating that the wine comes from a heritage vineyard.

While not universally adopted by growers, some of whom can’t be bothered to certify their vineyards and purchase the stickers for their bottles, the program has seen widespread and enthusiastic adoption by the industry as a whole.

Pinotage vines planted in 1953 at Bellvue Estate

What Is An Old Vine?

No universal definition for “old” exists in the wine industry. No legal parameters have been established for the use of the phrase “old vines,” “vecchie vini,” or “vieilles vignes” on wine bottles around the world.

What we do know, however, is that the typical cycle of vineyard replanting in the modern era runs to about 30 years. This is to say, by the time vineyards get to be about 35 years old, most commercially-oriented wineries both big and small are typically starting to rip them out and replant.

After about 30 years, depending on the grape variety, a vine will decrease the amount of fruit it produces. As vines age into their second and third decades, they also become more susceptible to disease, which can further impact yields. While some growers are willing to accept lower yields in exchange for what they see as an increase in quality, many cannot afford to.

A.A. Badenhorst’s Raaigras Grenache vineyard planted in 1952, Paardeberg.

Given that the generally accepted commercial lifespan of a vine in the modern era is about 25-35 years, it seems safe to call any vine that’s been around for more 35 years “old,” which is presumably how the Old Vine Project settled on 35 years as its standard for official designation.

Using this cutoff, it is estimated that only around 8650 acres of South Africa’s roughly 230,000 total acres of grapevines qualify for the designation.

Inspiring an Industry to Think Differently

It’s hard to over-state the impact that Kruger has had on the South African wine scene. In many ways, her efforts have helped to shape the rebirth of an industry struggling to recover from the apartheid era, and injected a sense of (well-deserved) national pride in the viticultural history of the Cape.

Cataloging old vineyards was merely the first necessary step. By leading an ever-growing cadre of younger winemakers to ancient vineyard sites, Kruger began the virtuous cycle that has led to the preservation and rehabilitation of these viticultural treasures.

Convincing people to make and celebrate wines from heritage vineyards isn’t the endgame, however.

In 2020 the Old Vine Project launched its Heritage Selections effort, which involves propagating cuttings from many of the country’s oldest vineyard sites in an attempt to preserve unique clonal material.

Many of the winemakers I spoke with on my recent visit believe that the region’s 360-year-old history of winegrowing, much of it in relative isolation, has resulted in unique clones of everything from Semillon Gris to Pinotage to Chenin Blanc, most with unique characteristics that are worth preserving, including some that remain mysteriously virus-free compared to European clones.

Indeed, in 2020 the main winegrowing association of the Loire Valley, InterLoire, sampled many of the best Chenin Blanc vineyards in South Africa and reported their analysis confirming that South Africa has Chenin Blanc selections that are now extinct in France.

InterLoire has now planted a library vineyard with those selections in France with the hopes of preserving that plant material.

Thick trunks of Pinotage vines at Bellvue, planted 1953.

“It’s not just about keeping old vineyards alive,” says André Morgenthal, Old Vines Project Manager since 2016. “We need to plant to grow old. We don’t fully understand how some of these vines have survived as long as they have. Climate change didn’t just start recently, and yet here they are. It’s survival of the fittest, we think. Everyone is exploring climate resistant plant material but some of the best might be right here under our noses.”

To that end, the Old Vine Project has recently begun planting its own vineyard, on an old rooibos farm in the Skurfburg area of Swartland, that Kruger and Morgenthal hope will become something of a “Mother Block” for widespread propagation.

Filled with clean cuttings from many of South Africa’s oldest vineyards, it will be both a research project and a nursery for studying, preserving, and sharing the country’s unique vine stock. Morgenthal expects the material, and a growing body of knowledge about how to farm for longevity, to be available for others to use starting in five or six years.

A Delicious Window to the Past

Pretty much everyone I know who writes about and tastes wine for a living agrees that old vines are something special. There’s now even a worldwide conference dedicated to them as well as an effort to make a global database cataloging old vine sites in every region around the world.

Wines made from ancient vines provide us a unique and romantic way of interacting with the past. With remarkable ease, sipping a wine made from 120-year-old vines can feel like a connection to something profound, an experience that somehow escapes the brief confines of our own life to touch threads of existence more durable than our own.

The complexity, character, and personality of wines made from old vines are simply different than those made from younger plants. In some ways, the fact that we don’t know the reason for this difference makes it all the more precious.

We don’t know what it is that we are tasting when we taste the difference that 80 years of rooting in the earth provides. But we do know these wines are different, and for many of us, quite special, not to mention rare.

I hope you enjoy my tasting odyssey through the old vineyards of South Africa, and will seek out some of these wines for the treasures that they are.

To read the tastings notes, view the origional article here.