One of the most talked about new wineries
in South Africa is Chris and Suzaan Alheit’s Alheit Vineyards, a
new venture based in Hemel en Aarde, but sourcing grapes from all
over the place. Chris and Suzaan work just with white grapes, mainly
Chenin Blanc but also a bit of Semillon, and their debut wine,
Cartology 2011, made a big impact on its release, getting some hefty
critic scores. I caught up with them at their base, Hemelrand, where
they make their wine.
The rave reviews for Cartology are well
deserved, but some of the point scorers who went big run the risk of
running out of points when Chris and Suzaan really hit their stride.
‘Cartology is our village wine,’ Chris says. ‘We want to start
building up a portfolio of single cru wines, all based on
traditional cape varieties, specifically Chenin.’
‘We are trying to make authentically
Cape wine, that can’t be imitated in other parts of the world,’
explains Chris. ‘There is evidence that Chenin and Semillon have
been here since 1656, so they have been here for about 80 years
longer than there is any evidence for Cabernet being planted in the
Medoc.’
The model for Alheit Vineyards is to work
with old bush vines planted on remarkable sites. ‘We are cherry
picking sites from around the Cape – they need to be high altitude
and dry farmed, and farmed as sustainably as possible,’ explains
Chris.
Alheit share the small winery at
Hemelrand with others, including Peter Allan Finlayson (Crystallum).
It’s not a big operation. 2011 was the first vintage, and
consisted of just 20 or so barrels of wine. Things have grown since
then, but not massively. There are about 40 or so barrels of the
2013 vintage, and we tasted from some of the barrels. ‘Everything
is old vine Chenin Blanc, with one exception, which is a 14 year old
vineyard, but other than that everything is 30 years or older,’
says Chris. ‘We are not choosing vines on age, but on site. For
example, Radio Lazarus is our first single vineyard wine. We had
options to choose older vineyards lower down the slope, but we would
rather go for something that is in its mid-30s from an amazing
site.’
One of the next in the series of single
site wines is probably going to be from a vineyard called Skurfberg.
We tasted from a few barrels of 2013 from this vineyard. ‘One of
the reasons we want to release this as a single site wine is because
it is ungrafted vineyards and we don’t have a lot of this left in
the Cape. It is from the area that Eben Sadie is calling Skurfberg,
but which is Citrusdal Mountain legally. It is a rescue vineyard
that was going to be pulled out, and we have exclusivity on this
little patch. It is like a monopole.’
This vineyard is 520 m above sea level,
out in the wilderness. ‘Skurfberg is way past anywhere anyone
thinks you can grow good wine latitude wise,’ says Chris, but the
altitude coupled with the soil makes it a good site. ‘It is really
high up, on a belt of mountains between the West Coast and
Clanwilliam. It is populated with these 90 year old bush vines that
look like little bonsais. The soil is sandveld, the top is mostly
sand, then it goes into loam and then into clay.’
The Alheit wines are made pretty
naturally, with no additions, save for some sulfur dioxide late in
the winemaking process. ‘Because we are not adding anything to the
wines, picking date is everything,’ says Chris. ‘We have to nail
the pick so we still have nice natural acid, because we let
everything go through malolactic fermentation that wants to.’
‘The idea is we are trying to take
winemaking out of the equation as much as possible,’ he continues.
‘We treat everything exactly the same. We are trying to get to
what the vineyards taste of. We don’t manipulate anything.
Everything goes into old oak barrels, and the youngest here is five
years old, so they don’t contribute anything except porosity.’
Chris doesn’t like new oak: ‘You should write something on the
similarity between new oak and retsina. It’s basically the same
thing: flavouring wine with a tree.’
‘Everything is whole-bunch pressed, and
we don’t press too hard. We press it, taste the juice, when I feel
it has had enough we put it into a tank, cool it, then rack it
within 24 h, with no enzymes or sulfur. It is pretty murky when it
goes in, but there are no heavy solids. Sometimes we put in some
slightly heavier stuff, I want some to be a bit grittier. If it
moves it moves.’
But this is not hardcore ideological
natural winemaking. ‘We like sulfur,’ says Chris. ‘We think it
is our friend.’
The resource of old vine Chenin vineyards
is a precious one, and it’s probably only because these vineyards
haven’t been rated highly in the past that the current crop of
young, ambitious winemakers can access them. ‘It is great for us
in the Cape that we are still expanding our vocabulary and have a
grape that is a vehicle for terroir,’ says Chris, referring to
Chenin. ‘Most of these vineyards were making bag in box in the
past. It is a stroke of luck. We are at a very fortunate place in
the history of the Cape right now where we can get in and do
this.’
‘The farmers don’t know what has hit
them,’ says Suzaan. ‘Suddenly they are getting triple the price
for their grapes, and everyone is talking about them.’ There is a
risk though, that some of the bigger companies might try to make a
move for vineyards being used by the likes of the Alheits and Eben
Sadie, now they’ve seen just what they can do. But Chris and
Suzaan think loyalty will prevent this from happening.
‘These guys are small time farmers,’
says Chris. ‘They are very loyal to us. We put our money where our
mouth is. We are paying far more than the market rate – we are
paying triple that, because the vines aren’t going to survive if
we don’t do this.’
The next two barrel samples compared
Chenin from two vineyards quite close to each other, but with
different soils. The first is a schist vineyard hired from Mullineux,
which is red Riebeek schist. The second is a Paardeberg vineyard
made of quartzy granite, with some mica in it. ‘The granite is
more kind of brilliant, bright and feminine,’ says Chris, ‘while
the schist has this sledge-hammer mid palate.’
‘I am very conscious of natural acid
and freshness in wines, says Chris. ‘If you add tartaric acid, the
wine just feels disjointed, with one arm longer than the other.’
We look at more barrels – one from
Franschhoek, which has turned very reductive, and another from the
Piekerneeskloof, which is a dramatic site and the Alheit’s highest
vineyard.
Then we taste a wine from another extreme
site, in a valley in the mountains behind Montague, on Karoo slate
soils. ‘The Karoo has the best soils in the Cape,’ says Chris,
‘but it is just too hot. This valley is high, 550-650 m, but it is
right on the edge of the Karoo escarpment. We pick this second last,
and it comes in at 22 brix. We can’t put it into Cartology because
it is not bush vines, and we have bush vines on the label. You
can’t start putting stuff in that isn’t bush vines or you’re a
dickhead. We don’t know what we are going to do with this, but it
is in the cellar.’
‘It is a miracle that we got it at
22,’ says Suzaan, ‘because we didn’t know what the sugar was.
Every time we called the farmer to ask him how it was going with the
sugar, the first time we called him he said it was 9 balling, and
this was in the middle of harvest. So we drove all the way there,
and it was quite low, at 19. The next time we called he said it was
13.5, so we just drove through and picked it.’
We finish barrel tasting with the 2013
edition of Radio Lazarus, the first of the cru wines. ‘This is a
pet rescue block of ours, which we think could be grand cru
quality,’ asserts Chris. ‘It is in the Bottelary Hills, and is
an exceptional site. It is 35 years old, but it was stuffed because
it had been farmed badly for two decades, and the guy was going to
pull it out before we got there. It’s at 400 metres and you can
see Table Bay and False Bay from the top. It is on shale hills, with
granite extrusions pushing up from underneath. It has two
personalities: the granite side and the shale side. We get a ton a
hectare. The first year we got 750 kg and put it all into Cartology.
We farm this on our own, and rent the block. The cover crops,
composting, building up the soil is all in our hands. Because it is
high up it ripens quite late.’
The vineyard was named because of a
nearby radio mast, and the lazarus bit comes from the fact that the
vineyard has pretty much been raised from the dead.
THE
WINES
Alheit Vineyards Cartology 2011
92% Chenin Blanc, 8% Semillon. This was cross-filtered before
bottling because it had 3.8 g/litre residual sugar. Lovely fine nose
of melon and pear. Delicately fruity. The palate is fruity and
expressive with some rich pear, peach and spice notes, a hint of
sweetness, some honey and a touch of tangerine. Very fine and
expressive with lovely texture and great acidity. 94/100
Alheit Vineyards Cartology 2012 86% Chenin Blanc, 14% Semillon. Taut, fresh, precise and linear.
Fine and very pure with acidity driving the wine. Linear and precise
with a hint of reduction adding complexity. Ripe pear, white peach
and a hint of tangerine, with great acidity. 96/100
Alheit Vineyards Radio Lazarus 2012 The first of Alheit’s single cru wines, from a high-up spot on
the top of Stellenbosch’s Bottelary hills. This is rich, ripe,
bold and powerful with notes of spice, pear, tangerine and peach.
It’s rich and creamy with a beautiful texture and fine spiciness.
Expressive with lovely acidity. Superb wine. 96/100
