The Franschhoek Wine Valley Visiting this sometimes misunderstood South
African wine region
This
was my first proper visit to Franschhoek, a South African wine
region that I have only really passed through before, with brief
stops. I was looking forward to spending some quality time here, to
give me a chance to get under the skin of the place. But this was a
slightly different wine trip. I’d been invited out by Kevin Swart,
of Black Elephant Vintners. I’d never met Kevin before, but I know
his brother Gary, an all-round good guy who’s a colleague of my
wife. Gary has been round to dinner at ours quite a bit, and he put
Kevin and I in touch. Kevin was keen for me to visit, because as a
recent arrival in Franschhoek after a career in finance in
Johannesburg, he couldn’t understand why Franschhoek wasn’t being
taken more seriously by the wine press. So Kevin
had got a group of producers together to chip in to pay my airfare.
Franschhoek is a paradoxical sort of wine region that is currently
enjoying great success, while at the same time struggling with its
reputation. This is because it has become the tourist hotspot of the
Cape winelands. Come here in summer, and you'll struggle to find a
place to park, and you'll have to make restaurant reservations in
advance. It's heaving, and for good reason: visitors are drawn by
the combination of natural beauty, a pretty town with nice places to
stay, and some of the best restaurants in the country. But wine
professionals don't take the Franschhoek Valley seriously. The
narrative is that Franschhoek is great for restaurants but bad for
wine, lacking in top quality terroirs. ‘The advantage of this valley
is that it is beautiful and it has lots of visitors,’ says Kevin.
‘The disadvantage of this valley is that it is beautiful and it has
lots of visitors,’ he adds. If you can make wine here you can sell
it.
This
image is reinforced by the fact that some of the biggest wineries in
the valley, such as La Motte and Boekenhoutskloof, are most famous
for their out-of-valley wines made from grapes brought in from other
regions. This practice is known locally as terroir by truck. But is
this really true? That's what I wanted to find out.
‘There’s lots of investment here, but very few people who come in
are serious about wine,’ says Ludwig Maske, owner of local wine shop
La Cotte. ‘Very few people are trying hard, and some young
winemakers are being pushed back.’ Maske thinks that Franschhoek
wines haven’t been taken seriously by the press. ‘The press seem to
have it in for us. People are jealous of Franschhoek, and a lot of
people have their knives in for Franschhoek. If Franschhoek turns
out a great wine, people ask where the grapes come from, and if they
aren’t from the valley that reinforces their opinion. But a lot of
our better wines are made from valley fruit.’
Surrounded on three sides by mountains, there is no denying that the
valley is beautiful. Wherever you are here, you will have a nice
view, and these dramatic mountains with their rugged beauty are a
unique feature of many of South Africa's wine regions. There is also
a range of soil types, with some vineyards so sandy you'd think you
were on a beach, others with rich deep loams, and others quite stony
and rocky. This is a small region, with just 1200 hectares of
grapes, which represents less than 2% of South Africa's total wine
region. Until the mid-1990s, pretty much all the valley's wines were
made by the local cooperative, but gradually wine farms began
bottling their own wine. Now there are dozens of small producers and
several big ones, making a large variety of wines.
I
found lots to like here in my short stay, and it's a mistake to
dismiss Franschhoek as being non-serious. I was focusing on smaller
producers whose emphasis is on working with Franschhoek grapes.
First of all, there's some amazing old vine Semillon here. Basil
Landau, a prominent businessman who settled here in the mid-1980s
and began a family at the age of 56, is the custodian of one of
South Africa's oldest producing vineyards. It's a scraggly 5 hectare
block of dry grown vines planted in 1905, and the wine it produces,
the Landau du Val Semillon, which is made by the talented Wynand
Grobler at Rickety Bridge (another of the valley's leading
wineries), is sensational. Basil now sells some of his grapes to
Black Elephant, and with these winemaker Jacques Wentzel is also
making a brilliant (albeit as yet unreleased) interpretation of
Franschoek Semillon. Marc Kent, possibly the most famous Franschhoek
winemaker, makes a superb Semillon, which is one of few wines he
makes from valley grapes. Others to look out for include Rob
Armstrong's at Haut Espoir and also the inexpensive but tasty
example from Franschhoek Vineyards.
Chardonnay is another strongpoint of the valley. Styles vary, but
the two Chardonnay specialists excelling with this variety are Môreson
and Glenwood, with the former more linear and the latter richer and
more generous. Perhaps the most famous example of Franschhoek
Chardonnay, however, is the Chamonix Reserve Chardonnay, which is
superb. La Bri is another name to look out for, making small
quantities of elegant Chardonnay in a linear style.
As for
reds, the leading variety is Cabernet Sauvignon, with honourable
mentions for Cabernet Franc and Syrah, although the latter two only
really excel on certain sites. I was really impressed by Dieter
Sellmeyer's Lynx wines, with Xanache, a Bordeaux-style blend, and
Cabernet Franc the stand outs. At La Bri, Irene Waller is making
some very serious Cabernet Sauvignon, although I suspect her heart
is really with Syrah, which she is doing great things with. I tried
several vintages of Rickety Bridge Paulina's Reserve Cabernet
Sauvignon, which is taut, structured and ageworthy. And one of the
best wines of the trip was the Ghost Gum, a 100% Cabernet Sauvignon
from Stony Brook Vineyards that spends a full 32 months in barrel,
but absorbs the oak effortlessly.
What
is the future for the valley? At the moment there is some tension
between those who'd like to keep the focus local, and those who
think that having a winery in Franschhoek is a commercial
opportunity to sell a lot of wine, given the large numbers of
well-heeled tourists who flock here. The valley is definitely a
tourist success story, and land prices here have risen considerably
over the last decade. Recently, Richard Branson bought Mont
Rochelle, and wealthy Indian businessman Analjit Singh bought three
neighbouring estates, totalling 200 hectares of vines, as well as Le
Quartier Français (together, these are being rebranded as the Leeu
Collection).
There's a momentum to Franschhoek that creates a commercial
incentive to appropriating the name for non-valley wines. The latest
move is to expand the Franschhoek WO to include neighbouring Paarl
Simonsberg, which would bring some high-profile Paarl wineries into
the Franschoek appellation. This is a highly controversial proposal.
The tourism side of the valley would welcome it, because from a
tourism perspective the more the merrier – and some of the proposed
newcomers are quite wealthy. But from a wine side, it raises the
question as to whether or not this compromises the integrity of the
identity of Franschhoek as a wine region.
So, a
pivotal question is whether or not Franschhoek has an identity that
is worth preserving, from a wine perspective. After five days, my
conclusion would have to be that there is something special about
the valley, and that this is something worth fighting for. It would
be a mistake to expand Franschhoek further (some would say that the
expansion that has already occurred in recent years is highly
questionable), and the winegrowers here would be ill advised to
accept the promise of sub-appellations in exchange for a broadened
WO.
There’s a film that I made about the valley, based on this visit,
including interviews with many of the leading players:
So
here are my producer profiles, based on the visits I made