Chardonnay is a white grape that is moderate and neutral in almost every aspect but acidity. This is why it is a favorite of winemakers all over the world. Chardonnay is relatively easy to cultivate and soaks up a vineyard's terroir easily. It grows vigorously and needs a strong hand in the vineyard, if not well pruned there is a serious drop in the quality of the grapes. Early budding and thin skins mean that it must be watched closely, especially in cooler climates like Burgundy.
As a nation, South Africans share a close bond with the land and agricultural production. One such pearl of enlightenment comes in the form of the old Afrikaans adage “‘n Boer maak ‘n plan” (translated literally as “a farmer makes a plan”), which evokes a certain upward-and-onward, can-do attitude - an innate chutzpah of sorts - with which South African farmers have often been associated. It was precisely this attitude and penchant for practicality that first brought the noblest of the white wine grapes, namely Chardonnay, to the country. Today, South Africa is considered one of the world’s undisputed leaders in producing high-quality and original Chardonnay wines.
Map of South African Wine Regions
A Relatively Short History
South Africa has been growing Chardonnay only since the early 1980s. The oldest Chardonnay vineyard in the country dates to 1981, and was almost certainly the result of smuggled cuttings from Burgundy and Switzerland, as were several of the other early installations of the grape.
In essence, it was towards the end of the 1970s that Chardonnay vines were smuggled into the country by a handful of South African winemakers returning from a trip to France. There was great excitement. This meant Chardonnay would be realized faster than official channels might have allowed.
Read also: Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority
Some older bottlings of South African Chardonnay Early Chardonnay pioneers included Hamilton Russell and De Wetshof, but the last few decades have seen a significant proliferation of plantings. South Africa now has 16,100 acres of Chardonnay in the ground, making up 7.2% of the country’s total vineyard acreage, farmed and vinified by hundreds of different producers. With some notable exceptions, Chardonnay seems to be concentrated in the cooler sub-regions of South Africa, the epicenter of which is Robertson, a small zone smack-dab in the center of the Western Cape.
The Beginnings of a Plan
These days it would be nearly impossible to imagine a local wine landscape without the Chardonnays of Hamilton Russell, Jordan, Hartenberg, Ataraxia, De Wetshof or Bouchard Finlayson. And yet, had it not been for a few farmers determined to “make a plan”, South Africa would probably not be the established Chardonnay producer it is today.
The most well-known of these pioneers was Danie de Wet from De Wetshof Estate in Robertson. “It was my palate, my tongue that set me on a quest to getting the Chardonnay grape growing in South Africa,” says Danie. “It still is, and will always be, the greatest white wine in the world.”
But when Danie began tasting Chardonnays, mostly from the wine’s ancestral home of Burgundy in east-central France, this variety was foreign to his homeland. Between 1968 and 1971, Danie took leave from the family farm of De Wetshof to study winemaking at the famous Geisenheim Institute in Germany. Upon returning to South Africa as a qualified wine farmer, his romance with Chardonnay abruptly turned to frustration as he realised how much ground the country still had to cover regarding its paltry wine offering.
“When it came to white wines, the South African wine industry was basically offering only two varieties, namely Chenin Blanc and Cape Riesling (Crouchen Blanc),” recalls Danie. “Great European grape varieties like Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Rhine Riesling - to name a few - were finding their way into the winelands of Australia, Chile, New Zealand and America.
Read also: Discover Thula Thula
A Road Abundant with Obstacles
Preventing this incorporation of new and different grape varieties was a great obstacle set by the South African wine industry under the auspices of mega-producer KWV, which also served as a regulator in the 1970s and 1980s. They called the shots, and wine farmers had to follow orders. As such, establishing a new grape variety in South Africa required farmers to overcome various administrative challenges:
- Plant material had to be approved, imported under strict conditions and planted in a regulated environment;
- Only after three to five years could the grapes from this plant be harvested and wine made; and
- The wine had to be approved by the powers that be. Only then could this new plant material be propagated for commercial use, the vines planted and - after another three to five years - the wine made.
“If South Africa wanted to have a competitive, world-class Chardonnay industry, we producers who wanted to grow the grape could not wait 15 to 20 years before our wines were commercially available,” says Danie. “But the authorities were dead-set in their ways, and so, some other farmers and I began to look at alternative methods of establishing Chardonnay.”
An Allied Front
And so began the journey of what is today a part of South African folklore, at least in the wine world. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Danie and a number of other impassioned Chardonnay-loving winemakers took it upon themselves to circumvent the authorities by illegally bringing Chardonnay vine-cuttings into the country.
Danie found a formidable partner in his Chardonnay-smuggling venture, namely Jan Boland Coetzee, the former Springbok rugby-player who had also put the Stellenbosch wine estate Kanonkop on the map.
Jan had left Kanonkop to work in Burgundy, the home of Chardonnay, where this grape had been growing since the 14th century. The region’s wines are still considered the gold standard for any winemaker attempting to produce Chardonnay today.
Read also: Traditional South African Bread
“In 1980, I was working for Joseph Drouhin, one of Burgundy’s leading producers of Chardonnay. When Danie called from South Africa to say he was looking for some cuttings, I knew just the vineyard for him,” recalls Jan. “It was the Clos des Mouches vineyard, just outside the village of Beaune in Burgundy. I cut Danie some shoots on a nice cold day, ensuring the plants would be fresh to travel. Then, I sent the parcel back to South Africa with a journalist who was visiting me in Burgundy.”
Danie and the other winemakers, including Jan himself, planted the material on their farms. Once this contraband Chardonnay came to the wine authorities’ attention, the government ordered an investigation. Danie and Jan were both hauled before the commission; in an uncharacteristic twist of fate, however, the decision was in favour of the defendants.
The Beginning
In the forty years (a mere nanosecond in the ancient world of wine) since first experimenting with the world’s most famous white grape variety, South Africa has garnered a reputation for creating Chardonnay wines of riveting quality and the remarkable ability to express the geographical landscape of the Cape winelands.
Emul Ross, winemaker at Hamilton Russell Vineyards in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, says Chardonnay is all about the soil, climate and topography - the terroir - where the grapes are grown.
“No other white wine expresses its address the way Chardonnay does,” says Emul, who is considered one of the young stars of the South African wine industry. “The best job South Africa’s Chardonnay producers have done over the past four generations is to create a portfolio of wines encapsulating the unique features of the Cape’s various regions. From the chalky soils of Robertson and the cool climates of Elgin and Hemel-en-Aarde to the rocky valleys of Stellenbosch….
Despite this diversity, most top South African Chardonnays have one thing in common: a refined elegance more akin to the wines of the Old World than the new wine cultures of America, Australia and New Zealand. One of the reasons for this sophisticated character is the extra care taken to select the right oak barrels for the wine-maturing process, with an emphasis on French oak. South African winemakers’ respect for Burgundy traditions is another reason.
“But it is what happens in the vineyards that determines your ability to make good Chardonnay,” says Johann de Wet, son of Danie and current CEO of De Wetshof.
Assortment of South African Chardonnay Wines
A Brilliant Tasting
Our hosts for this tasting were three luminary producers of South African Chardonnay: Hamilton Russel, one of the grape’s pioneers and one of the most acclaimed producers in South Africa, Richard Kershaw, a master of wine who decided in 2012 to make Chardonnay (and Pinot) in South Africa’s coldest wine region, and Capensis, a relative newcomer started by Antony Beck and Barbara Banke of Jackson Family Wines that quickly became a benchmark producer of the variety.
ARE SOUTH AFRICAN WINES GOOD? TASTING WHITE WINES!
I felt pretty good about the fact that I correctly identified the white Burgundies and matched two wines out of each flight of four correctly.
So how does South African Chardonnay stack up? Pretty damn well, I’d say. The top examples that were part of this tasting, as well as the many others I tasted demonstrated finesse, restraint, vibrancy, and balance in great measure.
At its best, South African Chardonnay has an electric brightness, fantastic minerality, and sometimes what felt like a wonderful sea-borne freshness that I found positively thrilling. These wines, while they might not manage to express quite as much mineral depth as the white Burgundies in the tasting, they certainly stood shoulder-to-shoulder with them in overall quality. In some cases, they clearly outshone some of the global reference bottlings, many of which were two to five times more expensive.
Differences in site and winemaking make for a wide variety of interpretations of the grape. On the whole, however, producers seem to show remarkable restraint in the application of oak, and generally favor higher acidity and lower alcohol than, say, the average California producer (though this may be as much a factor of the climate as winemaker intent).
All these factors add up very much to the credit of South Africa when it comes to making this most popular of grapes. Sadly, however, that doesn’t seem to have persuaded the local populace, who seem much less interested in Chardonnay than Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc. According to our hosts at this tasting, only 10% of the country’s roughly 4.5 million cases of Chardonnay are sold in-country.
That might be sad for local producers, but potentially good news for those of us elsewhere around the globe.
Chardonnay Wine Regions Around the World
Chardonnay is truly an international grape and grows all over the winemaking world. The styles vary greatly by region and by producer. Here is a brief overview of where it is growing, and broad tasting notes associated with each region.
France:
This is the ancestral home of Chardonnay. Burgundy, and in particular the Côte de Beaune, is the place where Chardonnay first captured the imagination of wine drinkers all over the world. From Meursault to Puligny Montrachet and beyond, the Chardonnays of Burgundy's appellations all exhibit different terroir and winemaking styles. As previously mentioned, Chardonnay is central to the winemaking in Champagne and Chablis, but it is grown throughout the rest of the country, with wines in the north half of France exhibiting leaner, more mineral-driven, light Chardonnays. Today, even the winemakers from the warmer climate of le Midi have started to adopt this more balanced approach to Chardonnay.
United States:
California is the second home to Chardonnay. After the Judgement of Paris, there was an explosion of plantings that stretched from Napa to Sonoma, and then up into Oregon and Washington. Wines from Carneros, the Russian River Valley, Alexander Valley, and even less well-known parts of Sonoma are producing Chardonnays similar to White Burgundy.
The Central Coast and Central Valley are where you will find many of the warmer, more classically "California" Chardonnays. Today we are even seeing good examples coming from the Finger Lakes region of New York. A long growing season and colder weather means that vineyard managers must be extra attentive to the grapes while they are on the vine. The results have been deliciously complex.
Italy:
The best Italian Chardonnays come from Tuscany in the oaky, California style. It is also used in the sparkling Franciacorta in Lombardy to delicious results.
Australia:
Chardonnay cultivation followed a similar trajectory in Australia as it did in the United States with much of the world-wide recognition coming in the 1970s. The best Chardonnays are made in South Australia around New South Wales, but there are a few isolated examples of Chablis-style Chardonnays being made in Western Australia.
New Zealand:
Despite the popularity of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, for many years Chardonnay was more widely planted. This has changed in recent years, and some good examples can be found, although many heavily feature oak.
South America:
If you are looking for the best-value Chardonnays a good place to start would be South America. Chile, in particular, produces excellent, well-made Chardonnays.
South African Wine Regions
With the exception of Lower Orange River and Douglas in the Northern Cape, nearly all South African wine comes from the Western Cape.
- Coastal Region: Has a hot climate making it an ideal place for bold red wines including Cabernet, Pinotage, and Syrah. There are several cooler microclimates too, producing lush styles of Chardonnay and Sémillon. Highlights include wines from the regions of Stellenbosch, Paarl, and Swartland.
- Breede and Olifants River Valleys: Are still very much considered the value wine areas of the country. You’ll also find many thousands of acres of white varieties including Chenin Blanc that are used for brandy production.
- Cape South Coast: Is tiny, but shows some of the highest potential for great quality, cool-climate wines including those of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and even sparkling wines (from Elgin). The region is very spread out and producers here are very individualized and unique.
Top South African Chardonnay Producers
Wineries across the spectrum have used the variety to carry the story of their particular terroir. Prominent champions not already mentioned will include Creation, Newton Johnson, Glenelly, Raats, Jordan, Hartenberg, Ataraxia, Rustenberg, Uva Mira, Rupert & Rothschild and Bouchard Finlayson.
Tasting Notes on Exceptional South African Chardonnays
Here are a few more outstanding Chardonnays from South Africa that I tasted during my recent visit.
- 2017 Longridge “Clos du Ciel” Chardonnay, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa: Pale gold in the glass, this wine smells of wet pavement and floral scents mixed with citrus oils. In the mouth, zippy grapefruit flavors mix with lemon and wet chalkboard all vibrating with sizzling acidity and notes of dried herbs. Fantastically bright, persistent, and long. Farmed organically. 12.5% alcohol. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $32.
- 2022 Tesselaarsdal Chardonnay, Hemel-en-Aarde, Western Cape, South Africa: Pale gold in the glass, this wine smells of lemon curd, lemon juice, citrus oil, and sea air. In the mouth, bright lemon curd flavors are tangy and juicy and enlivened with fantastic acidity. Aged in amphora. 13% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $39.
- 2021 Delaire Graff “Banghoek Reserve” Chardonnay, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa: Pale greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of apple and lemon with a brisk mineral note. In the mouth, the wine tastes of bright lemon and lemon curd flavors with a nice saline overtone and zippy, mouthwatering acidity. Barrel-fermented in 50% new French oak. 13.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $26.
- 2021 Hamilton Russel Chardonnay, Hemel-en-Aarde, Western Cape, South Africa: Pale gold in the glass, this wine smells of lemon curd and lemon oil. In the mouth, wonderful lemon curd and lemon oil flavors morph into deeply mineral lemon juice flavors that have a fantastic crystalline quality. Gorgeous. Amazing acidity. 13.5% alcohol Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $42.
- 2019 Hartenberg “The Eleanor” Chardonnay, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa: Pale greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of lemon pith and lemon oil with floral notes on top. In the mouth, the wine is bright and pithy with a slightly saline quality and flavors of lemon juice, lemon pith, and wet stones. There’s great acidity here and resonant minerality. Excellent. 13% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $43.
- 2021 Craven Wines Chardonnay, Polkadraai Hills, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa: Pale gold in the glass, this wine smells of lemon curd, lemon pith, and lemon juice. In the mouth, saline lemon pith, grapefruit, and a touch of herbs mix with wet chalkboard and a nice lemon peel note. Excellent acidity. 11.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $36.
- 2021 Laarman Wines “Focal Point” Chardonnay, Cape South Coast, South Africa: Light gold in the glass with a hint of green, this wine smells of lemon curd and citrus peel. In the mouth, wonderfully saline flavors of lemon curd, lemon peel, grapefruit, and wet chalkboard have a wonderful silky, texture and bright deep mouthwatering acidity. 13.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5.
- 2020 Capensis “Silene” Chardonnay, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa: Pale greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of lemon pith, lemon peel, and lemon curd. In the mouth, lemon peel and pith have a bright saline quality with hints of grapefruit and orange rind. Excellent acidity, hints of vanilla lingering in the finish. Made from three different vineyard sites in Stellenbosch. 14% alcohol. Score: around 9. Cost: $41.
- 2017 Capensis Chardonnay, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa: Light greenish gold in color, this wine smells of yellow herbs and a touch of chartreuse liqueur. In the mouth, lemon and lime plus grapefruit mix with lemon curd and lemongrass. Crisp and bright with a hint of candied citrus in the finish. 14% alcohol. Score: around 9. Cost: $75.
