“IF BABOONS could talk, they’d tell you that Chardonnay is their favourite fruit,” says Meyer Joubert, cellarmaster and viticulturist at Joubert-Tradauw outside Barrydale in the Klein Karoo. The baboons (and the birds) present a challenge he could do without, but what he manages to keep from them makes for wine under his own label as well as those of producers
Read moreTHE SWARTLAND Survivor Pinotage had impressed for quite a while before the appointment of Pierre Wahl as cellarmaster in January 2022. So much to look forward to in due course with ‘The Pope of Pinotage’ now in charge. After four years at the Friedman family’s Môreson cellar in Franschhoek, followed by 20 years at Neville Dorrington’s Rijk’s wine estate in
Read moreRECORDS APLENTY! There were five bottles up for grabs at the Strauss & Co Fine Wine Auction held in Johannesburg on 14 September 2021. All South African wines, ranging from a 34-year-old dessert to one from a barrel first filled in 1800 – some buyers in the room, some bidding online and others phoning through. Never before had anybody paid
Read moreWHO WOULD have thought it possible? The Mullineux couple Chris (viticulturist) and Andrea (winemaker), perhaps! But how amazing it was that the only white wine to fetch over R1000 a bottle on average at South Africa’s 2019 Cape Winemakers Guild Auction in Stellenbosch came from grapes grown in Barrydale, Klein Karoo – more than Ataraxia Chardonnay of Hemel-en-Aarde, more
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