The word terroir is often bandied about in wine circles in a way that suggests that the participants share a common concept of what it means and how to measure its influence. For many it serves as a given, like gravity, or the rotation of Earth on its axis: you know it must be there, because wine geeks talk about it with great authority.
The dictionary definition of “terroir” is “the characteristic taste and flavour imparted to a wine by the environment in which it is produced”. The problem is that for most wines (and for most wine tasters), the exact expression of the vineyard is impossible to taste. Even more irritatingly, while some of the elements affecting the vine are easily quantified (such as sunlight, soil pH and hydric stress), the exact role of the myriad less obvious factors remains elusive even to the most erudite of technical specialists.
But this doesn’t mean that the concept is meaningless: for the past several years DGB — one of the two biggest wine producers in SA — has been acquiring control of significant tracts of vineyard on the Helderberg side of Stellenbosch. This is a gamble based entirely on the concept of terroir, and a huge investment for a company that has only in the past decade emerged from a less-than-ultra-premium past.
The early results are impressive: at a recent tasting of their prestige brands, I sampled a line-up of current releases presented alongside older vintages. In every case the quality of the younger wine trumped the perfectly well-aged (but intrinsically less complex) older wines. The standout examples were the Boschendal Stellenbosch Cabernet 2021, the Nicolas 2023 and the Black Angus 2021.
I used the same occasion to taste wines that undoubtedly inspired DGB in its pursuit of site as the crucial building block of fine wine. The Boschendal Elgin Chardonnay tells the story in its name: a property acquired precisely because of the value of its cool climate grapes. Likewise, and for more than a decade, the Bernard Series Old Vine Chenin has drawn most of its fruit from a single block in Durbanville. The 2024 vintage is simply extraordinary — and a vindication of site-specific winemaking.
An indication of how little we know about the many factors that influence wine flavour emerged at a tasting presented by Hartenberg as part of a line-up of the estate’s high-end bottlings. It’s widely recognised that vineyards that are farmed organically and biodynamically yield fruit whose flavours are brighter and more luminous than under conventional viticulture. We are now seeing the same from producers — such as Hartenberg — who apply the principles of regenerative agriculture to their vineyards.
In Hartenberg’s experiment two wines were produced from a single vineyard, farmed as a single entity. The fruit was harvested on the same day, and identically vinified. The only difference was that, during the winter, cows were allowed to graze the winter cover crop on one side of the block. The two wines were spectacularly different. The explanation for this appears to be little more than informed guesswork and relates to the changes to the soil nutrients as the cows browsed the cover crop. If something this indirect can have so substantial an impact, we are a long way from unpacking the full implications of terroir.
Several of the single-site Hartenberg wines I sampled appeared to be brighter, more complex and more luminous than most of their older counterparts. Most notable among these were The Stork Shiraz 2020 and The Eleanor Chardonnay 2023 (though I thought the 2017 — perhaps the best vintage in the Cape this century — was simply splendid). Here too the explanation relates to terroir. Both were purer expressions of the fruit because the vineyards now are largely virus-free. As importantly, less new wood is being used in the vinification. If a grazing cow can change the taste of the grapes harvested from a vineyard, a layer of oak is even more likely to make opaque the sense of place.
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