We recently visited South Africa for the first time for 10 days on a trip sponsored by Wines of South Africa. We visited dozens of wineries and attended all three days of CapeWine, a trade show featuring about 400 wineries and, we’d guess, more than 2,000 wines. Here’s a list of 16 South African wines that are available, at least a bit, in the U.S. They are in alphabetical order.
south africa
November 04, 2022
"The New York Times a couple years back asked with climate change taking place, where would you buy your Burgundies, your Chardonnay Burgundies, if you weren’t able to buy them from Burgundy anymore. And they actually identified Elgin as a potential growing area for that."
"These old vines were able to survive the test of time. And with the roots being so deep in the soil and all the sandy soils, they were able to reach that last bit of reserves of water and maintain themselves where a young vine would have struggled." Schalk Opperman
May 16, 2020"We've spent the last 20 years really refining the ethos. And that is site-specific, single-terroir, single-vineyard in some cases, wines of character and immerse drinkability." " Jacques de Klerk Radford Dale
April 19, 2020'People have become more wise from a viticultural point of view and then learning to stand back in the cellar. So, if I look at South African wines over the last 10 years, there’s been a monumental shift in quality. It’s insane." Duncan Savage
April 04, 2020"...you can see the kind of things that we do here. We do regenerative farming as well. We don't till the soil. So in addition to trying to build the soil back, it builds up top soil." Ginny Povall
February 22, 2020"Elgin (Chardonnay) tends to have a little bit more flesh on the bones, a little bit more plumpness that kind of gives you that impression that you see really in Burgundy." Richard Kershaw
October 17, 2019"I believe wine in a bottle is capturing the geography and geology of a specific area at a period of time. We try our best to capture the expression of the terroir as much as possible." Luke O’Cuinneagain
June 29, 2019"We went to the awards function, and to get into the hall and you see that there's only two black people who are here at the function, and the rest of the black people we are seeing are the waiters and waitresses." South African Winemaker Ntsiki Biyela
January 13, 2017The Constantia and Stellenbosch regions in South Africa are best known in the United States but there are some lovely artisanal and affordable wines from smaller regions worth seeking out.
