Less than 50 years ago there were no vineyards — certainly none producing quality wine — east of Somerset West towards Cape Agulhas.
All wine farming was under the statutory authority of the (old) KWV. Establishing a new appellation was pretty much an impossibility. To do so required a grape-growing quota (effectively a planting permit).
This, in the old SA, was a matter of political connection. There was no prospect of any new allocations being made to Johannesburg-based and politically liberal Tim Hamilton Russell when he decided to establish a vineyard in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley near Hermanus.
Hamilton Russell wanted to grow cool climate varieties. In the late 1970s the chardonnay and pinot noir planting material available in SA was badly virused. Even those who were not unsympathetic to him thought the venture was doomed. They reckoned without his persistence and resilience. He went ahead despite the viticultural obstacles, official resistance and bureaucratic inertia. To balance his books, he ended up planting cultivars that had little to do with his vision of a SA Burgundy in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley.
When his son, Anthony, took over the running of the property in the 1990s he was faced with the challenge of maintaining the image his father had conjured up while building an enterprise producing one chardonnay and one pinot noir. There’s no doubt he’s been successful: both wines sell out pretty much on allocation to more than 50 markets around the world. They are priced against international benchmarks, retailing locally for about R800. The chardonnay in particular garners many accolades. The pinot is more celebrated in overseas markets. The estate was the Platter Editor’s winery of the year for 2025.
Anthony abandoned his father’s short-term strategy of trying out different varieties and blends across a spread of price-points as a way of funding the business and replaced it by creating two wholly independent ultra-premium brands.
The Ashbourne white is a sauvignon blanc-chardonnay-semillon blend called Sandstone; the red is a deluxe pinotage sold at a premium to the Hamilton Russell pinot noir — perhaps in an attempt to rebrand the image of the Cape’s calling card red variety. There’s also a separate enterprise called Southern Right, supplying sauvignon blanc and pinotage at relatively high price-points to local and international customers.
This clear separation of varieties and brands has met the objective of balancing the books while enabling Hamilton Russell Vineyards (HRV) to meet the late founder’s vision of a Burgundy cellar in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley. This is, in fact, his lasting legacy: his apparent madness of the 1980s is very much the orthodoxy of today.
Tim Hamilton Russell’s first winemaker — Peter Finlayson — established his own winery and property in the early 1990s on a site adjacent to Hamilton Russell near the entrance to the valley. Other winemakers who made their names at HRV have remained in Hemel-en-Aarde and founded their own brands. Kevin Grant makes one the Cape’s finest chardonnays at Ataraxia. Hannes Storm has a cellar further up the valley and makes three single-site pinots (each of which he believes expresses the terroirs of the three appellations, namely Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, Upper Hemel-en-Aarde and Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge) as well as two equally pure chardonnays.
Over the years the valley has become a magnet for winemakers brave enough to take on the challenge of Cape pinot. The Newton-Johnsons consistently produce some of the finest examples — of which the Seadragon and Windandsea are among my favourites. La Vierge’s Apogee is worth seeking out, as are Creation’s pinots and chardonnay. Restless River’s much-vaunted Ava Marie chardonnay has a strong following. Relative newcomers Cap Maritime and Hasher Family produce good pinots (and Cap Maritime a delicious chardonnay).
Finally, by way of the ultimate endorsement of Tim Hamilton Russell’s prescience, Peter-Allan Finlayson (son of Hamilton Russell’s founding winemaker) makes some of the Cape’s best pinots. His top wines are made with grapes sourced from sites within a few kilometres of where his father established the vineyards that launched the appellation.
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