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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