The heartland of the Agulhas Wine Triangle is bleak and beautiful. There are some gentle rolling hills but also stony flat stretches where koffieklip drystone walls criss-cross the landscape. Just more than 20 years ago it became one of the new frontiers of Cape wine. The first brand was Land’s End, established in 1998 and recorded in the Platter Guide of 2005 as “some of SA’s most southerly vineyards ... owned by a syndicate of six owners who continue to insist on anonymity.”
Charles Hopkins — now at De Grendel — and one of the country’s most knowledgeable sauvignon specialists, discovered its potential. Those with their ears to the ground began to pay attention. A few years later Quoin Rock, which had been one of the pioneer producers, won a trophy at the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show for an oaked sauvignon called “The Nicobar” (named after one of the countless ships which had foundered on that treacherous stretch of coast.)
By then it was hard to ignore what was going on at the very end of the African continent. One by one the bigger name brand-owners came visiting. If you made cool climate wines you needed to consider access to Agulhas-Elim fruit. If you were brave, you could farm there yourself, but there were risks. In the early days the birds decimated the crop. The cold weather sometimes made it impossible to achieve full ripeness; rain and the wind battered the vines. Droughts were tougher, and lasted longer. Better to contract with a reliable grower who would carry the farming exposure and who was on site and able to react if the need arose.
Strandveld built the first winery and took a bit of a shotgun approach with its plantings: shiraz and pinot noir as well as sauvignon blanc early on, later a bunch of southern Rhone varieties. Today if you ask anyone who tracks classically styled sauvignon blanc in SA, Strandveld’s Pofadderbos will be on their radar.
Round about the same time Dirk Human, one of the first fruit growers to take the plunge into wine production, launched Black Oystercatcher, a name guaranteed to be as memorable as the wines themselves. As with Strandveld there’s sauvignon and semillon, shiraz and a Cap Classique. If you’re looking to select from the range the wines that best express the Elim-Agulhas region you would hone in on the sauvignon blanc and the White Pearl semillon-sauvignon blend.
Cederberg’s Dawid Nieuwoudt makes his Ghost Corner range with fruit sourced from Francis Pratt’s The Berrio — the vineyards of Elim’s original trailblazer. Once again sauvignon and semillon deliver the most striking statements of place. Trizanne Barnard of Trizanne’s Signature Wines sourced the syrah for the highest scoring wine at the 2020 Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show from Elim.
Lomond’s sauvignon, semillon and syrah are among the country’s best, with the 2019 Pincushion Sauvignon a Platter 5 star laureate. Bruce Jack’s The Drift Estate in Napier is the source of the fruit for his Gift Horse Single Vineyard Barbera, his There are Still Mysteries Single Vineyard Pinot Noir, his Ghost in the Machine Malbec-Viognier blend and his Moveable Feast Red Blend — all of which rate 4.5 stars in the Platter guide.
Remarkable as the speed with which this new frontier of the Agulhas Wine Triangle has made inroads into the wine world, even more extraordinary is the spirit of collaboration among its members. When your appellation is a destination and not a detour, there’s no room for petty rivalries. This co-operation has obviously contributed to the wine route’s commercial success.
More importantly it played a key role when the Covid-inspired liquor lockdowns brought unimaginable hardship to the rural communities of Agulhas. The government may have forgotten its citizens, but the members of the Wine Triangle, their own livelihood threatened by the regulations, rose to the occasion. Together they were able to provide more than 10,000 meals monthly to those who had been brought to the very edge of starvation by the national coronavirus command council.
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