The Winelands: Pinotage, Chenin and Cape Dutch

Pinotage: the grape that was invented

Almost every wine grape you have heard of is an accident — a chance seedling or a natural crossing, selected and propagated over centuries because someone noticed it was good. Pinotage is not. It was created deliberately in 1925 by a professor at Stellenbosch who crossed Pinot Noir with Cinsaut, a hardy, generous-yielding variety then known locally as Hermitage. The intention was to combine Pinot Noir's quality with a vine that could actually cope with Cape conditions, and the name is simply the two parents run together. It remains the only major wine grape that exists because of a specific breeding programme in a specific place, and that place is here.

Its reputation is complicated and it is worth being honest about why. For a long stretch of the late twentieth century a good deal of Pinotage was made badly — over-extracted and over-worked, producing a harsh, sometimes acetone-or-burnt-rubber character that gave the variety a bad name internationally and that a generation of wine drinkers has not forgotten. That is a winemaking failure rather than a fault in the grape, and it has largely been fixed. Contemporary Pinotage, made with a lighter hand, is a genuinely good wine — dark-fruited, smoky, with real structure — and there is a popular coffee-and-chocolate styled version that is unsubtle but extremely easy to like. Taste it here with an open mind, because what you may have tried elsewhere twenty years ago was not representative.

What the Cape actually does best

Pinotage is the famous one; it is not the region's strongest suit. That distinction belongs to Chenin Blanc, and the numbers are striking: South Africa grows more Chenin Blanc than any other country on earth, including France, where the grape originates. Locally it is often called Steen. Much of it was historically planted for volume and distilled or blended away, but a great deal of it is very old — dry-farmed bush vines of forty, fifty, sixty years and more — and old-vine Chenin from those blocks is the most distinctive and consistently excellent thing the Cape makes. If you drink one thing here, make it that.

Beyond it, the region does Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux-style blends well, Syrah increasingly well, and Chardonnay very well in the cooler pockets. And it has a strong tradition of traditional-method sparkling wine, made by the same technique as Champagne and known here as Méthode Cap Classique, which is generally excellent and priced far below its European equivalent. Sauvignon Blanc from the cooler coastal districts is the everyday white that South Africans themselves drink most of.

The three towns are not interchangeable

Stellenbosch is the largest and the natural base: a university town of oak-lined streets and whitewashed gables with the greatest concentration of estates around it, a serious wine research faculty, and enough restaurants, bars and student energy to make it a pleasant place to stay for several days rather than pass through. If you want variety and volume of choice, start here.

Franschhoek is the small one and the food-led one. It was settled in the late 1680s by French Huguenots, whose names survive on many of the farms, and it sits at the closed end of a steep valley that gives it a dramatic setting the others do not have. It has a concentration of ambitious restaurants that is remarkable for a town of its size, and it is the easiest place to visit without a car, for reasons in the next section. It is also the most manicured and the most expensive, which some visitors love and others find a little polished.

Paarl is the least visited of the three and the most workaday — bigger, less tourist-shaped, set beneath enormous granite domes, with a good deal of serious wine made around it and noticeably lower prices. Constantia, meanwhile, is not in the Winelands at all: it sits inside Cape Town's own southern suburbs, dates from the 1680s and is the oldest wine-growing area in the country, which makes it the obvious choice if you have half a day rather than a full one.

Why the buildings look like that

The whitewashed, thatched, symmetrical farmhouses with elaborately curved gables are Cape Dutch, and the style is a straightforward case of settlers adapting a European template to different materials and a different climate. Local lime gave the brilliant white walls, local reed gave the thatch, and the Mediterranean-type climate of the Cape — hot dry summers, wet winters, a pattern shared with only a handful of wine regions worldwide — made both entirely practical. The houses are typically laid out on an H or T plan, which produced cross-ventilation and let every room have windows on two sides.

The gable is the signature and it does more than decorate. Raised above the roofline at the front, it interrupted the thatch and slowed the spread of fire between sections of a highly flammable roof, while giving the owner an obvious surface on which to display craftsmanship, a date and a name. Many of the finest examples are on working wine farms and can simply be walked up to as part of a tasting visit, which makes the Winelands one of the easier places anywhere to see three centuries of vernacular architecture without visiting a single museum.

Visiting without wrecking the day

The obvious problem with a wine region an hour from a city is that tasting and driving do not combine, and the Winelands' roads are policed. There are three workable answers. Take a guided tour, which is the simplest and removes the question entirely. Nominate a driver, which works but is a poor deal for one person in the group. Or use the hop-on hop-off wine tram that runs in the Franschhoek valley, linking a substantial number of estates on a fixed circuit — it is the one genuinely no-car solution in the region, it is why Franschhoek suits visitors without transport, and it books out ahead in season.

A few practical points. Tastings are generally paid, often modest, and frequently waived or credited against a purchase, so ask. Most estates now prefer or require booking, particularly for restaurants, and the good restaurants book out weeks ahead in summer. Three or four estates in a day is a comfortable maximum and two done slowly is often better than four done efficiently — the estates are large, the settings are the point, and the long lunch is a legitimate use of the afternoon. Buying is straightforward, and most farms will arrange shipping, which is worth asking about before you fill a suitcase.

Seasons, and where the interesting wine has moved

Harvest runs from roughly February to April, which is late summer here, and the region is at its busiest and most atmospheric then — though also its hottest and most booked. Summer generally is hot, dry and beautiful. Winter is the underrated season: the valleys turn green, the mountains often carry snow on the high peaks, the tasting rooms light fires, prices fall and you can walk into places that would be impossible in February. Spring and autumn are the reliable middle.

The other thing worth knowing is that the most interesting South African wine of the last two decades has increasingly come from outside the three famous towns. The Hemel-en-Aarde valley behind Hermanus, cooled by the sea, has become a serious Pinot Noir and Chardonnay district. The Swartland to the north, once dismissed as bulk country, turned out to be full of very old dry-farmed bush vines and is now the centre of the Cape's most ambitious winemaking. Elgin, up in the mountains, is cool enough for fine Chardonnay and Riesling. None of these is on the standard day trip, all are within reach of Cape Town, and any of them will show you a region that has moved on considerably from its own postcard.