Is Stellenbosch the New Saint-Émilion?

Friday, 26 September, 2014
Will Lyons on Wine
An influx of new talent is pushing to make South African wines some of the very best in the world

The last time I visited Klein Constantia, one of South Africa's oldest wine farms, I had a long conversation about baboons. I won't go into the details; suffice to say I hadn't appreciated the havoc a hungry troop could cause. Winemaker and owner Lowell Jooste eventually took me outside to show me where he was thinking of installing some high electric fences.

Now, the fences are installed—and pretty much everything else has changed too.

The Jooste family sold the estate to Zdenek Bakala and Charles Harman in 2010, and the winemaking duties are now fulfilled by Matthew Day, a frighteningly young-looking 29-year-old with an impressive resume that includes stints in Bordeaux, Australia's Barossa Valley and Dancing Hares Estate in Napa.

In many ways, Klein Constantia reflects what is happening more widely in the Western Cape today. Since I first visited the region in 2008, the scene has changed considerably, with an influx of new talent with high ambitions to make wines that sit alongside the very best in the world.

As U.K. Master of Wine Tim Atkin wrote in his July South African report: "Maybe I'm just getting old, but the average age of the leading Cape winemakers seems to be getting younger." It does.

Last year, Mr. Atkin published a classification of wineries in South Africa—which he updated in July—based on the Bordeaux system of 1855. In it, he points to a handful of First Growth estates such as Alheit, Crystallum and Cape Point, which are barely two decades old—some a lot younger.

"There's a new, revived energy in the South African wine industry at the moment," says Klein Constantia's Mr. Day, as we taste a range of his Sauvignon Blancs in London.

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