CHAPTER NINE
South of the Equator
New Heights for Andean Wine
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
The awesome crags of the Andes glitter like icebergs in the early morning sunlight as the plane lets down here in western Argentina, across the grassy Pampas from Buenos Aires.
Runoff from the melting Andes snows, diverted into canals built by the Tehuelche Indians as early as the 16th century and improved by the Incas and the Spanish, makes Mendoza bloom. Although located at the edge of the Cuyo desert, this is a city of plane trees and sycamores, shady parks and broad plazas, fountains and rose gardens.
That same water nourishes the vineyards surrounding the city. Mendoza wines have helped to make Argentina the world’s fifth-largest producer, a reliable source of inexpensive red for the country’s thirsty population, much of which traces its origins to Italy. But until recently they have never counted for much in world markets.
Dr. Nicolás Catena is changing things; not single-handedly, exactly, any more than Michael Jordan single-handedly won pro basketball championships for the Chicago Bulls. But he has shown customers in North America, as well as friendly rivals here, what Mendoza can do at every price level. At 61, slight, soft-spoken and studious-looking in rimless glasses, he is the acknowledged star, the pacemaker, the public face of the Argentine wine industry.
It is an industry in rapid ascendancy. More first-class wines appear with each vintage, and critics and consumers around the world have taken notice. On the shelves of shops in the United States, labels like Balbi, Flichman, Norton, Santa Ana and Terrazas have won space, along with Catena, of course.
Despite the country’s debilitating economic troubles recently, foreign millions continue to pour in to finance new vineyards and wineries.
Beginning with Dr. Catena’s grandfather in 1902, the Catena family established a local reputation for red wines. These wines, made largely from the criolla grape, were too sweet and too often oxidized.
“We never imagined,” Dr. Catena said, that “anyone here could compete with the Europeans—perhaps 10 percent as good, no more.”
Dr. Catena’s great awakening came when he went to the United States. Already armed with a Ph.D., he studied economics and mathematics at Columbia University during the turbulent late 1960s and then, in 1982, found himself at Berkeley as a visiting professor. Inevitably, he visited the Napa Valley. Almost as inevitably, he fell under the spell of Robert Mondavi, whose winery was at that time helping to establish lofty new standards for American wines.
“I discovered what investment, research and enthusiasm could achieve,” Dr. Catena told me and my wife, Betsey, over a candle-lit dinner under the maple trees at 1884, the restaurant that he has set up in his century-old Bodega Escorihuela. “I saw that the Americans had done in 10 years what the Europeans took over 300 years to do.
“I decided that I had to do something similar. I thought we needed to make cabernet and chardonnay, even though we didn’t use those grapes much in Argentina at the time. They were the best, obviously, and I wanted them.”
After a time, Dr. Catena got to know the peripatetic Mr. Mondavi, and they discovered that their families had come from the same part of Italy—the Marche, on the Adriatic coast.
Top Catena cabernets and chardonnays have been exported to the United States for a decade now, and they have received enthusiastic notices from the world’s wine critics—easily the equal of the reviews accorded to the much better-known vintages of Argentina’s neighbor to the west, Chile.
Unlike some Chilean producers, Dr. Catena has been careful not to price himself out of the North American market. The number of wine drinkers in New York or Los Angeles willing to pay $50 a bottle and more for his top-of-the-line Zapata reds may be limited, but for those who are not, there are Catena wines at more modest prices, sold under Catena Alta, Catena and Alamos Ridge labels.
“In the end,” said my English friend Bill Baker, one of his country’s most respected wine merchants, “Argentine wines will be better and better priced than their Chilean competitors.”
I tasted Catena Alta cabernets, merlots and malbecs from 1997 and 1999 with Dr. Catena, and they were only slightly less aristocratic than their Zapata counterparts, which had not yet been released. They had just as much fruit, just as much robustness of flavor, perhaps a little less opulence and complexity. The Alamos Ridge wines, tasted in the United States, made a less vivid impression, of course, but they struck me as good values at around $10 a bottle.
The Argentine wines that interest me most are the ones made almost nowhere else, including the chunky, chewy, spicy malbec among the reds and the tangy torrontés among the whites.
Malbec, which is also called Auxerrois by the French, was once an important grape in Bordeaux, used extensively in the days before the great phylloxera epidemic of the 19th century in wines like Château Latour. Now it is used only in Cahors in southwestern France, where it traditionally produced heavy, intensely tannic wines, almost black in color, which were often not ready to drink until they had spent two decades in the bottle. Modern Cahors is a bit gentler.
Argentine malbec is different. The deep violet glints in the glass are similar, as are the jammy flavors of ripe berries. But where the tannins in Cahors can be quite harsh, those in the best Argentine malbecs are sweet and silky, and the wines give no impression of heaviness at all despite their power. They make perfect companions to Argentina’s great beef or to our own.
In 1960, Argentina had 120,000 acres of malbec, but then came the stampede to “international” grape varieties like cabernet. Now there are only 25,000 acres left, but the best of those vines, including several owned by Catena and by the Austrian-controlled Bodegas Norton, are 70 to 100 years old. At the moment, Pedro Marchevsky, the Catena vineyard manager, is conducting experiments with 135 malbec clones in the company’s Tikal vineyard.
The torrontés vineyards are some of the world’s highest, many more than a mile up, near the village of Cafayate in the northwestern corner of the country, not far from the Bolivian border. No movie theater or bright lights there, “just work,” laughed Susana Balbo, a highly regarded Argentine winemaker who toiled for a time in Cafayate. Two of the best examples are made by Etchart and Michel Torino, both reminiscent of albariño and viognier in their jasmine-scented bouquets and fresh tropical-fruit flavors (mango? pineapple?).
Another, only slightly less appealing torrontés, easier to find in the United States and irresistibly priced at about $7, is made by Santa Julia.
At the moment, the light of Dr. Catena’s life is a striking new winery near here, built of cream-colored local stone and pale, indigenous hardwoods in the shape of a Mayan pyramid. It opened earlier this year. His daughter Laura Catena, the company’s export director, a Harvard- and Stanford-educated physician who somehow combines the practice of medicine in San Francisco with her work in the wine trade in Argentina, commented recently that the $12 million building “shows our pride in our own culture.”
So does 1884, the Catena restaurant. The family recruited Argentina’s premier chef, Francis Mallmann, to create a menu that celebrates the Incan influence in the region, with dishes incorporating corn and pumpkin, as well as the beef of the Pampas—not to mention, of course, the wines of Mendoza.
Much of the cooking is done in the courtyard in traditional igloo-shaped mud ovens, or hornos. We sampled bitter, palate-cleansing chicory, seared at 600 degrees, with almonds and sun-dried tomatoes; empanadas made the old-fashioned way with hand-chopped instead of ground beef; a tart of onions and leeks, and magnificently juicy goat, scented with lemon and oregano, roasted in an iron box—all the while talking politics, monetary policy, Machiavelli and wine prices with Nicolás Catena.
On the latter subject, he said, “I have known from the start that if I charged $40 a bottle, the wine had to be comparable with a French wine selling for $60 or $80, because people are not used to costly wines from here.” And he acknowledged that like Mr. Mondavi and his Italian friend Piero Antinori, he makes far more money on his cheaper wines than on his prestige products.
But he pours his passion into the top of the line. He has raised the quality bar in Argentina by limiting production through the pioneering use of controlled irrigation and by rigorous thinning of his grapes. He has planted vineyards at altitudes as high as 4,900 feet, which provide the cooler temperatures and lower humidity that help to produce premium grapes. He has imported French barrels and computerized European winemaking gear, installing them in immaculate wineries that contrast starkly with the unhygienic facilities and poor barrels that plagued wine production in Argentina for decades.
Others have joined him here in the pursuit of modern excellence. Hiram Walker, Moët & Chandon, Pernod Ricard, Kendall-Jackson, Allied Domecq, Sogrape of Portugal and several Chilean companies have made huge investments. Exports have grown to about $140 million from $40 million in the last five years.
Norton, which was founded in 1895 by a British engineer who had worked on the railway across the Andes, now belongs to the family that controls Swarovski crystal. Carlos Tizio Mayer, the technical manager, described its strategy: to keep prices down—no more than $15 for the top blend, marketed as Norton Privada—“so we can earn a little money and a lot of customer loyalty.”
“It’s easy to produce very expensive wine here, but it’s not so easy to produce good value,” he told us as we toured the winery, which is surrounded by spectacular rose gardens. “We want to make our name and attract our customers now, because in the next few years only three or four Argentine names will loom large in the international market, and we intend to be one of them.”
I was taken with Norton’s 2000 sauvignon blanc, a crisp yet fruity wine with just the right sharpness, but there, too, it was the malbec that turned my head. The 1999 exhibited had a nose like a magnet that drew you right into the glass, and a typical big-shouldered, almost rowdy style on the palate.
Never contaminated by phylloxera, the Argentine malbec, as Mr. Tizio said, “is a natural treasure in its genetic purity.” It can make great wine.
August 2001
South African Goes From
Never a Sip to Vineyard Fame
By BARRY BEARAK
When Ntsiki Biyela won a winemaking scholarship in 1998, she was certainly a curious choice. She had grown up in the undulating hills of Zululand, living in a small village of huts and shacks. People tended their patches of pumpkins and corn. The only alcohol they drank was homemade beer, a malt-fed brew that bubbled in old pots.
Indeed, Ms. Biyela had never even tasted wine, nor had anyone she knew. Her choice of study was a fluke. Though she had been a good student, none of her grant applications for college were approved until an airline, hoping to promote diversity, offered to pay her way to study viticulture and enology: grapes and wine. What was wine? the young woman wondered, guessing it was another name for cider.
She had never been outside the eastern province of KwaZulu Natal, but she boarded a bus and traveled across South Africa to the wine country of the Western Cape. She gazed at the immense mountains. She puzzled over the short, thin trees planted in perfect rows. She had no idea what they were.
Finally, Ms. Biyela tasted the beverage she had come such a distance to study. She and a handful of other black scholarship students met with a wine connoisseur, Jabulani Ntshangase. He opened a superb red, raised the moist cork to his nose and talked rapturously about the wine’s fruitiness and color and fragrance. She was expecting to sip something sublime when handed the elegant, long-stemmed glass. Instead, she was stunned. It was disgusting.
Ms. Biyela, having definitely adapted her tastes, is now one of this nation’s few black winemakers in an occupation that has been dominated by white people for 350 years. Her blends of merlot, cabernet sauvignon and pinotage have won gold medals and four-star ratings. She was named South Africa’s Woman Winemaker of the Year in 2009. Last month, she was busy judging the country’s entries for the International Wine and Spirit Competition.
“Somehow I fell in love with the ever-changing content of wine,” she said as if still surprised by her own journey. “Wine is never the same today as it is tomorrow. It even depends on where you drink it and who you are with and what mood you are in. It’s a very, very nice thing.”
Though apartheid has been swept away, this country is still a racially divided society. Ms. Biyela is a pioneer in its transformation, not someone elevated through political connections, but a rural woman who made it on grit.
“I live in two worlds,” she said recently. “I’m still able to fit in the village, speaking Zulu and eating pap. I also fit in the European-style world.”
She pondered the difference. “In the European style it’s about striving, the ‘me life,’ everything about me. In the village, it’s all about the community.”
South Africa regularly ranks among the world’s top 10 wine producers, and while the climate and soils are welcoming to the grape, the industry’s history has dismal chapters. Vineyards were long tended by slaves, and even after emancipation, working conditions remained both horrendous and insidious. In the so-called dop system, laborers were paid partly with a daily quotient of cheap wine. Dependence on alcohol was the boss’s method of control.
Things have improved, though hardly by enough in one of South Africa’s showcase industries. Just this week, Human Rights Watch issued a report severely criticizing the working and living conditions in the vineyards.
The country has far more wine than wine drinkers. More than half the production is exported, and even if everything were shipped away, most of the population would barely notice. A large majority of South Africans are black and poor. Beer is their drink, and they are not interested in a lot of conversation about bouquet. No one sniffs the bottle cap.
The wine industry has a few mentoring programs for nonwhites, but there are still only about 20 black winemakers. “You have to respect Ntsiki; she comes from a culture that is so thoroughly alien to wine,” said Tim James, a leading wine critic. “She’s actually incredibly brave.”
Ntsiki (pronounced n-SEE-kee) is short for Nontsikelelo. Her mother was a maid in Durban who saw her daughter maybe once a year. Ms. Biyela, now 33, was raised by her grandmother in the village of Kwa Nondlovu. Like other young girls, she fetched water each day from a river. She walked seven miles to a forest to gather firewood. She studied in a poorly equipped rural school.
Her scholarship was to Stellenbosch University, in wine country. Most everyone on campus spoke a language heavy with “cch” sounds as if they were clearing their throats. This was Afrikaans, the main tongue of the region and the language in which her instructors taught. She did not understand a word of it.
During the first year, the courses were basic: mathematics, physics, biology, botany. To her relief, the same subjects were taught to forestry students in English, and she attended classes with them. But the rest of the four-year program was mostly in Afrikaans. She kept up with notes prepared in English.
Tariro Masayiti, a black Zimbabwean, was one of her classmates. He did not speak Afrikaans either, but he had already been trained in winemaking and excelled from the start. “Ntsiki was a typical village girl, in the way she looked, in the way she talked,” Mr. Masayiti said. “I don’t think she even knew how to turn on a computer. But then she changed. I say this with admiration.”
While still a student, Ms. Biyela was given a part-time job at Delheim, a large winery, and this led to her enological conversion. She not only worked in the vineyards and the cellar but also served wine to visitors in the tasting room and was consequently obliged to discuss what she poured. So she too tasted. She developed her palate.
After graduation, Stellekaya, a boutique winery in Stellenbosch, hired her as its winemaker. It was a big leap, and the winery was taking a big chance on someone so inexperienced. A consultant helped her in the beginning, but soon she was on her own. Her very first red blend won a gold medal at the country’s prestigious Michelangelo awards. Most other blacks at the awards ceremony were waiters. They erupted in cheers at the announcement.
Ms. Biyela is a short, energetic woman with freckled cheeks. Braided strands of hair swing from her head. She discusses her craft without pretention. “Very nice” is her favorite superlative. She hopes more of her black compatriots will warm up to wine and says, “It won’t happen until people think of it as part of their food and not something that needs to be smelled and talked about.”
The vocabulary of the wine world sometimes amuses her. At one tasting, she listened to the connoisseurs as they detected the intricate flavors.
“One is saying, ‘I am picking up hints of cassis,’ and another is saying, ‘I can smell truffles,’ ” she recalled. “I probably shouldn’t have done this, but I said what I was smelling was cow dung.”
She did not use those words to be mean, she said. In one of her two worlds, cow dung is used to make floors and walls. “It’s a smell I grew up with. I didn’t grow up with truffles.”
August 2011
A Winemaker, Transplanted
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
Zelma Long has cut a broad swath through the California wine world for a quarter-century and more. Soon she will see whether her widely acknowledged expertise as a winemaker will enable her to do the same thing in this country’s heart-stoppingly beautiful Cape vineyards, more than 10,000 miles from the Napa Valley.
“This place is made for fine wines,” Ms. Long told me over a lunch of calamari and shredded oxtails in saffron cream sauce at Tokara, the winery where her new wines will be made for the next few years. “It has all the advantages of soil and climate you could want, plus a viticultural tradition stretching back many centuries.”
Ms. Long and her husband, Phil Freese, a leading authority on the planting and cultivation of vines, will introduce two cutting-edge blends bearing the Vilafonté label to the South African and American markets later this year: an “M” series, mainly merlot and malbec, and a “C” series, mostly cabernet sauvignon. The prices will be hefty: $50 and $70 a bottle respectively, on a level with California’s classic reds.
With the globalization of the wine trade, French and Australian and a few Italian winemakers have taken on consulting jobs around the world. “Flying winemakers,” they are called, because they flit from country to country. But Ms. Long and Mr. Freese intend to play a role more sustained than that. She said that she planned “to be as hands-on as I can possibly be,” spending three to four months here every year.
Although some local growers privately expressed skepticism that Ms. Long would find her American experience quickly applicable in this country, and others predicted that her prices would prove too high, John Platter, a prominent South African wine writer, said that so far Ms. Long and Mr. Freese had been warmly welcomed by their peers.
“There’s no sense at all that they’re interlopers,” he added, “because they’ve been coming here for such a long time.”
Now 61, Ms. Long was one of the first women to study for a master’s degree in enology at the University of California, Davis, the top wine school in the United States. She honed her craft under Mike Grgich at Robert Mondavi’s vineyards, later serving there as chief winemaker for almost a decade. In 1979, she shifted to the Sonoma Valley, scoring a notable triumph at Simi Winery, which she restored to its former eminence before stepping down as president and chief executive in 1999.
For the last 28 years, she has also owned Long Vineyards in the hills east of the Napa Valley with her first husband, Bob Long, turning out rich and very long-lived chardonnays in the European style, as well as several other superb wines. That, too, helped to establish her as the most important woman in American wine, a trailblazer who helped open the door for later stars like Helen Turley and Cathy Corison.
A rangy woman who looks a lot taller than her 5 feet 8½ inches, Ms. Long is a bluejeans-and-khakis, plain-talking type who seems equally at home in the vineyard, the boardroom and the barrel room.
She and Mr. Freese own 50 percent of Vilafonté; the other 50 percent belongs to Michael Ratcliffe, scion of the family that has operated the highly regarded Warwick Estate in nearby Stellenbosch for more than four decades. The founder of a group of young and progressive winemakers called Rootstock, he will oversee Vilafonté’s operations when Ms. Long is out of the country.
A fourth major player at Vilafonté, the San Francisco–based wine merchant Bartholomew Broadbent, has an equally impressive pedigree: he is the son of Michael Broadbent, the celebrated London wine auctioneer and commentator. He will import Vilafonté wines to North America.
Vilafonté’s initial production, the 2001 and 2002 vintages, was privately bottled; now comes the big test, the 2003, which was bottled last January at Tokara, a showplace hillside winery outside Stellenbosch. It will reach stores sometime this autumn. An initial tasting of both the “M” and “C” series showed great promise, the “M” suppler and fruitier, the “C” more commanding.
The two demonstrate what modern techniques and liberation from bureaucratic shackles have done for the best new South African wines. Stale, musty flavors and ham-handed heaviness have been supplanted by clarity, subtlety and finesse.
Attracted first to South Africa by Gyles Webb, the Indiana-educated pioneer who made some of this country’s first and best modern wines at Thelema, Ms. Long paid her initial visit in 1990 and returned in 2001 to make a speech “defining the unique position that I believe South Africa can build for itself” in world wine markets.
It came at an apt time. The country and its winemakers were just emerging from the long, dark tunnel called apartheid, which not only stunted the sales of South African wines in many foreign markets but also blocked the importation of virus-free clones. Ms. Long gave her audience every reason to be confident about the future.
She noted the country’s “enormously old and diverse soils,” which support more than 8,000 species of often vividly flowering plants, including the magnificent proteas. As a result, she continued, “along with California, South Africa has more potential for varietal diversity in a relatively small area than any wine-growing country in the world.” It also benefits from coastal fogs rolling in from the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, which converge at South Africa’s southwestern tip, near the main winefields.
A relatively cool climate, low rainfall and moderate humidity, Ms. Long argued, “give wines that have personality and flavor length” without the aggressive tannins that mar reds in some growing zones.
Since then, dozens of South African wines have achieved world-class quality, and many others stand on the verge of excellence. Far-flung new wine areas like Swartland and Walker Bay are thriving. My friend Anthony Hamilton Russell’s pioneering Hamilton Russell vineyard, situated above Walker Bay in the wellnamed Hemel-en-Aarde (“Heaven on Earth”) valley, makes superlative pinot noir, as does Bouchard Finlayson. New varietals like mourvèdre, shiraz, viognier, riesling and sémillon (new to South Africa, that is) have been more extensively planted, and chenin blanc is staging a comeback.
In addition, a few black South Africans are slowly moving into ownership and management positions in the wine industry—far too slowly, many complain, but at least the transformation is under way.
Vilafonté was laid out in 1998 and 1999 in a shallow bowl on the northern slope of the Simonsberg, one of the stark peaks that lend the Cape region such drama. It was planted with classic Bordeaux varietals, including cabernet sauvignon, malbec, cabernet franc and merlot, using global positioning satellite data to establish vine rows in harmony with sun and drainage patterns.
Mr. Freese, who holds advanced degrees from Davis, also uses a technique that he developed while working at Mondavi, called the Normalized Differentiated Vegetative Index, to monitor the plants’ vigor. With the aid of aerial photos taken by a special camera at particular wavelengths, the index helps to pinpoint weaker vines and to detect any early symptoms of the infestation by phylloxera lice that is fatal to vines.
Ms. Long told me there were no plans to build a winery for now. By 2007, she and her husband hope to have found and converted a building for such use, with a built-to-order facility to follow later if the economic climate makes it practical.
About 30 acres have been planted so far, with a potential for 50 more on the same property. The present 30 produced 1,700 cases of “M” and 1,300 cases of “C” in the 2003 vintage. When fully planted, the vineyard will produce 15,000 to 18,000 cases, which is a fair-to-middling total, certainly well outside the boutique range.
Ms. Long grew up in the Pacific Northwest and graduated from Oregon State University. She is especially attracted to the wines from the Walla Walla district in southeastern Washington, a few miles north of the Oregon border, most of all the merlots made there, which she said she considers some of the best in the world.
Those merlots—powerful, well-structured wines with big, soft tannins rather than the lightweights often made elsewhere—bear a strong resemblance to those being produced by some South African wineries. Vilafonté intends to join them.
A bit later, Ms. Long said, she and Mr. Freese also plan to “take another look at pinotage.” That grape, uniquely South African, resulted from a crossing in the 1920s of cinsaut and pinot noir. Wines made from it are sometimes coarse, with an unpleasant aftertaste, but winemakers at vineyards like Kanonkop and other estates near Vilafonté’s property have been producing well-oaked pinotage with a fruity aroma.
Under the umbrella of Zelphi, their new company, Ms. Long and Mr. Freese have kept busy as consultants, working with clients in South Africa, Washington State (Abeja), California (Gundlach-Bundschu) and Israel (Golan Heights Winery).
But they have been less successful in their own small-scale projects abroad. Simunye, their initial South African effort, a joint venture with Michael Back of Backsberg, also in Paarl, foundered because of disagreements among the partners. It was discontinued a few years ago.
In Germany’s Nahe Valley, through which flows a small tributary of the Rhine, the two teamed with Monika Christmann, a leading German wine educator and writer, to produce a riesling that they called Sibyl. From the first vintage in 1998 it attracted highly favorable comment, but with Germany’s depressed wine prices, Sibyl was not big enough (four and a half acres, 450 to 900 cases a year, depending on the harvest) to prosper.
“It cost much too much to market the wine,” Ms. Long said, “so we have just closed the whole operation down.”
All of which serves as a reminder that even for people as obviously talented and widely experienced as Ms. Long and Mr. Freese, there are plenty of pitfalls in starting new ventures in far-off winelands.
June 2005
Meals in the Bush, Now With Fine Wines
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
Guess what? Some of South Africa’s choicest wines and most satisfying food are served far from the bright lights of Cape Town, right in the midst of the wilderness, along a shimmering stream called the N’wanetsi, where hippopotamuses frolic, crocodiles slither and vivid birds of several hundred species fill the air with their trills.
At Singita Lebombo Lodge in Kruger National Park, hard by the Mozambique border, a few privileged clients live for a few magical days in suites hung like eagles’ nests on the face of basaltic cliffs, amid cactus-like, candelabra-shaped euphorbia plants.
Buffalo heads and zebra rugs have been banished from these airy quarters, which blend natural fabrics, eucalyptus floorboards and outdoor showers with plate-glass walls, high-tech chrome fixtures and furniture designed by Arne Jacobsen.
Nothing had prepared me for such marvelous digs or for the terrific meals that came with them. When I lived in Kenya in the 1960s, the food in the game reserves was pretty rudimentary, just a notch or two above mess-hall chow.
Things are different now, and not only in the culinary department. This is the new South Africa—worldly, eco-friendly and postmodern.
The day starts just after dawn with a three-hour drive by open Land Rover through a private, 33,000-acre concession accessible only to the lodge’s guests. Lions and giraffes, buffaloes and elephants and rhinoceroses, impalas and zebras, waterbucks and kudus with majestic corkscrew horns all remain unfazed by human visitors.
Back at the ranch, a bountiful breakfast awaits to deal with appetites whetted by the fresh, unpolluted air, featuring fresh orange and litchi juice, luscious passion fruit yogurt, and a cornucopia of local fruit. My wife, Betsey, a connoisseur in these matters, pronounced her eggs Benedict (three days running) the best she had ever eaten, and I was equally pleased with a zesty potato, sautéed onion and chili omelet I concocted from a long list of potential ingredients.
Boerewors (beef sausage)? Bacon? House-cured salmon? Grilled portobellos or tomatoes? Homemade muffins? Toast made from freshly baked bread? Tea? Faultless espresso or cappuccino? Merely ask and it shall be given, delivered by a corps of waiters more competent than those in some of New York’s more pretentious restaurants. Ours was named “Secret.”
Midday heat is for resting or swimming, and perhaps a light lunch—salade niçoise with hard-boiled quail eggs, or chilled strawberry soup, or a well-made B.L.T. (no commonplace thing). We mostly passed, already amply fed for the moment.
But on our first day, we indulged, and in the process we got an inkling of the wonders hidden in the lodge’s air-conditioned 4,600-bottle wine cellar (a siloshaped tower, actually, between the hotel bar and a baobab tree). The Singita group buys the very best South African vintages available, matures them in Cape Town, then dispatches them in refrigerated containers to the four lodges it operates, including Lebombo. The much more traditional Boulders Lodge, outside Kruger, stocks as many as 6,000 bottles.
Gerry Terblanche, the Lebombo sommelier, led me proudly through his carefully annotated list of 200-odd wines, with winemakers duly credited. He conducts tastings for interested guests and recommends wines for each day’s menus. But anyone can order anything at all from the full list, including rarities like the honeyed, lime-accented 1999 Vergelegen Semillon Show Reserve, which is available in no other restaurant. It made an ideal partner later for our Asianinspired spring rolls.
On a visit to the tower, Mr. Terblanche pointed out some of the delightfully fresh viogniers that South African winemakers have recently begun producing, as well as two of his favorite reds—the supple, well-balanced 1999 Rubicon, a Bordeaux-style blend from the Meerlust estate, and the intense, ruby-red, prizewinning 1999 Peter Barlow 100 percent cabernet from the Rustenberg estate, which was established in 1682, not long after Château Latour.
It all costs a pretty penny—$1,000 a day per person, including room, meals, cocktails, wines and game tours. Only Champagne costs extra.
“I think of us as missionaries for South African wine,” Mr. Terblanche said. “I hope our visitors leave us with a vastly improved impression of our wares.”
Dinner each day is preceded by a second game drive. We hit the jackpot with Derek Boshard, peerless ranger-driver, and Dudu Mabunda, tireless tracker and dispenser of good cheer, spotting superb beasts and birds (like the awesome bateleur eagle, the carmine bee-eater and the spectacular lilac-breasted roller) and learning a lot about local botany, geology and geography as well as animal feeding and mating habits.
The chef Rachel Buchner’s simple yet sophisticated food—“wholesome and uncomplicated,” the lodge’s brochure calls it, with reason—lived up to the wonders of the bush and the riches of the cellar.
In the open-sided dining room overlooking the pool one night, we ate those delicate, phyllo-wrapped chicken spring rolls with a mango and coriander relish, followed by a juicy steak and rich house-made fresh fig ice cream. South African beef, generally grass-fed and additive-free, is famously tender and universally popular, and we couldn’t resist. But a well-spiced Moroccan chicken casserole was on offer as well.
Another night, Ms. Buchner and her team mounted a luxury version of South Africa’s favorite meal, a barbecue or braai (rhymes with eye), in an amphitheater of boulders, lighted by campfires burning in braziers. No paper-plate picnic, this: a full bar had been set up, three red and three white wines had been readied and tables had been set with proper china, wineglasses and modern cutlery, with chrome-and-canvas directors’ chairs drawn up around them.
After serving a bracing corn and lemongrass soup, a battalion of cooks wearing white toques took their posts behind a battery of charcoal-filled oil drums to grill giant Indian Ocean prawns from Mozambique; coils of boerewors; venisonlike kudu steaks, medium-rare—the equal of any hoofed game I have eaten—and lean, dark ostrich fillets. There were lots of veg to go with them, including glazed baby carrots, herbed new potatoes and butternut squash. Most of the British clients chose cauliflower with cheese sauce from the buffet line, and Betsey, ever the Anglophile, joined them.
We had heard a lot about a new wine called De Toren Fusion V, so we tried the 2000 vintage. It nicely symbolizes the newfound democratic spirit that animates both the political and viticultural worlds in South Africa, in that its makers actively seek feedback not only from experts but also from rank-and-file enthusiasts. A blend of the five classic Bordeaux grapes, it proved just the ripe, lusty ticket with our grilled meats.
No one could argue with a tart-sweet sorbet made with local passion fruit, and we ended contentedly with that.
I couldn’t help thinking how astounded Ernest Hemingway and his sometime hunting partner, the columnist and novelist Robert C. Ruark, would have been by this spread. Both Africa-lovers with big bucks to spend, they had to settle on safari for francolin, a duck-size bird as tough as an elderly owl, cooked on a campfire.
But they would have recognized the sights and sounds we encountered later that night. A crocodile lazily crossed our path and long-eared bush hares hopped down the road as we drove home, thoroughly enchanted by the whole place, beneath a sky filled with stars of incredible intensity.
June 2005
An Australian Sibling Comes Into Its Own
By ERIC ASIMOV
Half a century ago, two wines were born at Penfolds in South Australia. They were like brothers, really. Both were made largely of shiraz, with a little cabernet sauvignon occasionally thrown in, yet they offered completely different expressions of the same grapes. As with so many siblings, each seemed to represent all that the other was not, the apparent differences concealing their shared pedigree.
One of these wines is now justly celebrated around the world. It is prized by collectors and commands $200 to $300 a bottle for recent vintages and far more for bottles with a little age. This wine, christened Grange Hermitage and now known simply and grandly as Grange, is today the most famous of all Australian wines.
Its brother has lived a considerably more obscure life. It goes by the modest name St. Henri, which sounds especially self-effacing if you pronounce it with an Australian accent. As you might guess, it is a quieter wine than Grange. Yet its elegance and purity, for those who take the time to know it, are undeniable.
Back in the 1950s, Grange and St. Henri cost essentially the same. Today, you can find St. Henri for around $50 a bottle, not cheap by any means, but a relative steal for a wine of this quality.
The history of St. Henri and Grange is a story of the importance of preserving choices among wines. It is a reminder of how different styles can best be understood and appreciated in contrast to one another, and a cautionary tale about how fragile this diversity can be. As Grange and its stylistic adherents became wildly popular, Penfolds considered doing away with the St. Henri approach.
“Marketing types kept urging us to keep the name, keep the label, but change the style,” said Peter Gago, the chief winemaker at Penfolds, who visited with me in New York last week. “But we resisted, and it’s never changed.”
Mr. Gago came to New York with 13 different vintages of St. Henri, ranging from a 1958, which offered a quick impression of its youthful allure before slowly fading in the glass, to a robust-yet-juvenile 2002, which will be released this spring. As he and I tasted through the wines, it was fascinating to compare the St. Henri style with the better-known Grange, and to see how beautifully St. Henri stands up for itself.
Grange, which was first produced as an experiment in 1951, was at first considered shockingly modern. Max Schubert, its creator, was consciously trying to produce a shiraz with the aging potential of top Bordeaux, and he made a big, powerful wine that was aged in small barrels of American oak.
The initial reception was lukewarm.
“Knife and fork stuff,” one journalist said at the time, referring to the young wine’s almost impenetrable concentration, a style that many have since come to prize.
By contrast, St. Henri was considered an old-fashioned wine, even in the 1950s. Unlike Schubert, John Davoren, a Penfolds winemaker who created St. Henri, looked backward for inspiration. He wanted to make a wine that demonstrated the pure character of the shiraz grape rather than framing it with the flavors of new oak. Yet he was not making a small wine; younger St. Henris have a sort of raw-boned power, while grape tannins offer a structure that can last for years.
Instead of using small barrels of new oak, which can impart powerful flavors, he chose to age the wine in huge oak vats that were at least 50 years old, which have minimal impact on the flavor of the wine.
The battle of styles characterized by the use of small new barrels or big, old, neutral containers has been fought all over the wine-producing world, from Barolo and Montalcino to the Rhône and Burgundy to California. Those who have favored the lusher, rounder flavors imparted by new oak have held sway for the last 20 years, but tastes may slowly be moving back toward the center as a small but significant portion of the public has been registering its vote in favor of less oak influence.
Mr. Gago said he has noticed an increased interest in St. Henri in the last few years.
“Everything is about fashion, isn’t it?” he said. “What’s old is new again.”
From the almost joyously grapey 2002 back to the still-dignified 1958, each decade offered different insights into St. Henri. A 1962 had a eucalyptus quality, while a 1966 had a sense of power and a caramel-like flavor that Mr. Gago called “praline.”
A 1971, from one of South Australia’s best vintages, was rich and complex, with smoky, meaty flavors that lingered in the mouth, while a 1974—a poor vintage—was pleasing, though without the concentration of the ’71. A 1976 was inky black, with a pronounced licorice flavor. I loved two vintages from the 1980s, the ’83 and the ’86, but my two favorites in the tasting were the 1990 and the 1991, both excellent wines that kept changing in the glass. The ’90 was pure, with sweet fruit aromas and a high-toned brightness, while the ’91 seemed to have darker licorice and plum flavors.
What was striking about the wines was their transparency, each offering clear insights into the peculiar characteristics of different vintages.
“It’s much harder to make this style,” Mr. Gago said. “The fruit quality has to be that much better because it’s not just a component, it’s the structure, too. So much more effort is put into the fruit, the vineyard and the grapes, because you don’t have the other support.”
The grapes for St. Henri, like those for Grange, come from a variety of sources in South Australia. Each year, Mr. Gago and his team of winemakers do numerous blind tastings to select what will go into the St. Henri blend. For St. Henri, he said, he is looking for fleshy, succulent flavors, as opposed to the assertive, darker, chunky Grange flavors. Neither wine offers the pleasure of tracking the flavors of a single vineyard over time. For that, there are other shirazes, like Henschke Hill of Grace or Penfolds’s own Magill Estate. Nonetheless, both Grange and St. Henri have their important place.
“Too many people, they don’t even look sideways at St. Henri because they don’t get the style,” Mr. Gago said. “But there are so many different variations on a theme. Why not offer them?”
February 2006