Capensis

Capensis Harvest Report 2023

Wine beyond a lifetime

I’m always looking for an opportunity to disappear into the bush. Next month, my family and I will spend four weeks overlanding through Namibia. It’s out there in the desert, under a sky more star-studded than black, nothing but sand dunes and a few acacia trees in sight, that the sheer vast emptiness of it all shrinks you to insignificance and you hear the quiet, thrumming power of place.

It always amazes me on a continent like Africa bursting with a raw, rugged beauty, that the story of South African wine seems to have forgotten this. We’ve stopped looking at the where of wine, focusing on the who instead. We seem to think that only the cult of personality can sell wine or have a meaningful impact on wine drinkers; that passion is reserved for people rather than places. But if we look at the finest wines in the world, can anyone name the winemaker? Does anyone care? No, I don’t think so. These are wineries made to last decades, if not centuries. They’re wines of a place, not a person. If a South African wine brand’s lifespan is that of a surfboard or the wash cycle of an irreverent t-shirt, what chance does South Africa have for creating wines of longevity?

Capensis began with a single goal: to create world class South African Chardonnay. Ethereal wines that gain an ineffable complexity with age, yet still twang with freshness years after cellaring. When we began searching for the best vineyards in the Western Cape in 2012, our brand home Fijnbosch in Stellenbosch’s Banghoek stood head and shoulders above everything else we’d ever tried. Standing on our topmost vineyard at some 600m above sea level, Stellenbosch rolls out like a carpet before you. This block was planted against conventional advice because of its low yielding potential and intensive farming requirements. Yet, we correctly knew it would make phenomenal grapes – if not in our generation then in the next. Here, the giant crags of Groot Drakenstein Mountain rise ahead, and clouds bump up against the Simonsberg to your left, while granite soils crunch underfoot and insects hum in the surrounding fynbos. You can’t deny the fizz of this place. It’s what brought me back from California after twenty years. Sure, California is efficient. Everything works. It’s shiny. Predictable. South Africa, on the other hand, is not perfect growing country. You can’t predict vintages, certainly not the political climate, and definitely not load shedding. You never know what’s going to happen next. But this place has emotion. It’s alive.

The 2023 vintage is a perfect example of this. We had a particularly dry winter and summer before we were hit by significant thunderstorms in December which replenished our subterranean root systems, giving our wines that mineral edge – an essence that otherwise goes missing in drought years. Yet, with no bad heat waves we managed a lot of beautiful hang time. Really, it was stacking up to be one of those perfect golden vintages.

And then those March rains came. When that first wave hit, we fortunately only had about 4 tonnes left on vine. We didn’t waste any time. Within three days we’d pulled everything off this property. It’s funny, harvest has a stressful reputation, but I never lose sleep during harvest time. I have sleepless nights during pruning when one mistaken snip of a secateur can have an affect 40 years down the line.

Despite the rain, we had a magnificent vintage. 2023 will be superb for Capensis Chardonnay. Unfortunately, rightly or wrongly, critics tend to base the success or failure of a vintage on red wines, Cabernet in particular. I’m wary of this complicating 2023’s reputation, as some red wines won’t necessarily tick the right boxes of critic’s big, rich expectations. However, I’m quietly confident about what we’ve got in the cellar. And while I’m withholding judgement on our first Capensis red project from Helderberg fruit, I’m excited to see how they perform down the line – though that’s a story for another day.

While this vintage forced many winemakers to look at alternative energies in the face of unrelenting load shedding, I hope it’s woken many up to the requirements of our changing climate. We know what’s coming down the road. We’re going to have to prepare for a future of extremes: extreme droughts, extreme temperatures, extreme storms… As farmers and winemakers, it’s our duty as the caretakers of natural spaces to arm them against these extremes. If we want our vineyards to last for the next 200 hundred years, we need to give them the chance to contend with these conditions. Planting for the future is about resilience.

At Fijnbosch, we’ve constructed a careful game plan of resilience. Afterall, you make world class wines by caring for world class vineyards. To buffer yourself against the extremes of climate change, you’ve either got to be close to the ocean or you need some fantastic altitude. Luckily, we have both. But we don’t just rely on geography when designing our vineyards; we actively engage in working with nature’s cycles and ensuring that nothing is wasted. We’ve removed all alien plants from the property, adopting a nose-to-tail approach with our gum and pine trees to create planks that we’ve used to build our tasting room. Fijnbosch has harnessed water catchment areas, chosen drought-resistant rootstocks and encouraged biodiversity with the creation of natural bug gardens. We make our own compost, laying down 4 tonnes per hectare to create a healthy microbial environment for the vines to thrive in. Just last month we planted bulbous vegetables, like radishes, as cover crops to create more biological material and nutrients in the soil. Really, I’d love to have grazers, but we first need to figure out where we’d house the sheep to prevent the local caracal from picking them off as midnight snacks. We’re also dedicated to creating a better future for South Africans, starting with our own team, ensuring their wages can cover more than basic needs, giving comprehensive medical aid for everyone and their families. Our newest farm worker has been with us for 15 years.

We began Capensis with the purpose of making world class wines and we farm Fijnbosch with the intent of growing grapes able to achieve that. These are wines with life, that zing with the tension of place, and vibrate at their very edges. This is our eleventh vintage, and while I think we’re close to the world class mark, we’re never going to stop learning or being inquisitive. It’s an evolution. Capensis is going to be around long after we go. We’re creating a legacy property for a wine brand that will last many lifetimes.