Cape auction season

Tuesday, September 17th, 2013

The Cape’s auction season starts in earnest on Friday 6 September with the Nederburg Auction, followed by the Cape Winemakers Guild (CWG) Auction on 5 October and from 15 March 2014, the Cape Wine Auction – a glitzy all-charity auction inspired by AuctionNapaValley – will extend the beau monde of bidding, buying and hobnobbing.
The latter will either confound or provide relief from the almost futile but frequent comparison between apples and oranges by adding an entirely new fruit to the Cape auction landscape. Meanwhile both have been applying new – whether stricter or different – wine selection criteria in recent years in perceived competition with one another.

The new CWG entry criteria includes technical analysis and excludes peer approval in an apparent attempt to ease the politics for both buyers and sellers, while this year’s wines seem a more accurate reflection of what the wider trade is experiencing.

The increase in white wines for example – 18 of the 58 wines – makes a wider range of varieties and greater balance between the mix of varieties and blends but disappointingly only two Chenin Blancs (including a sticky) and surprisingly only two Pinotages are listed. Adi Badenhorst gives Grenache Gris and Johan Malan Roussanne their auction debuts.  Conspicuous by their absence are Cape and Rhône white blends, while Shiraz is the biggest category in 2013.

In keeping with the Guild’s innovation ethos, a number of new wards are making their auction debut. Charles Hopkins introduces Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc from the soft yellow shale of the Ceres Plateau (960 m), Bartho Eksteen debuts Hemel-en-Aarde’s Sondagskloof (Sunday’s Glen) with a Sauvignon Blanc, his first auction wine, and David Trafford with a Shiraz from Malgas (Sijnn Vineyards) in the Cape South Coast region.

Ernie Els’ winemaker Louis Strydom spoke of his excitement surrounding planting Girond or Medoc selection clone 412 Cabernet Sauvignon to provide smaller bunches and berries. Local nursery Vititec, in partnership with France’s Entav, now offers a wide selection of European varieties and quarantine time has been reduced to one year. Popular varieties include Grenache, Marsanne, Roussanne and Vermentino, with Cinsaut making a comeback.

While there was about as much unanimity among the writers regarding their favourite wines as you would expect from a bunch of economists, some did find favour among many of them including Andries Burger’s (Paul Cluver) Chardonnay, Charles Hopkins’ (De Grendel) Pinot Noir, Pierre Wahl’s (Rijk’s) Chenin Blanc, Kevin Grant’s (Ataraxia) Chardonnay, John Loubser’s (Steenberg) white Bdx blend, Jan Coetzee’s (Vriesenhof) Cabernet Sauvignon and Boela Gerber’s (Groot Constantia) Shiraz or Geraas (noise in Afrikaans) as some say in the Cape.

– Jonathan Snashall