South Africa is one of the most important wine producing countries in the southern hemisphere. With over 300 years of wine making history, it is often described as a bridge between the Old and New Worlds. The majority of wines are produced using New World winemaking techniques, but they often have more stylistic similarities with their Old World counterparts. Since the end of apartheid, South African wine has received international attention and recognition for its wide variety of styles.
The South African wine industry is spread across the lush and rugged landscape of the Western Cape. Here, the abundance of mountains, valleys and plateaus allows winemakers to produce a wide variety of styles. Wineries can also be found in the Orange River region of the Northern Cape, where the flat, arid landscape is dominated by the Kalahari Desert. Most of South Africa's wine regions have a MediterraneanClimate, strongly influenced by the meeting of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
The country's signature Grape is Pinotage">Pinotage, an indigenous cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsaut that is rarely found in quantity in any other wine producing country. Shiraz is also widespread, as are Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot (often combined in a Bordeaux blend).
However, white grape varieties account for 55% of the country's 96,000 hectares of vineyards. Chenin Blanc is the most planted grape variety in the republic with 18.
Inside the Christmas 2022 issue of Decanter magazine: FEATURES Mastering Christmas Discover which delicious vinous treats MWs Susie Barrie and Peter Richards will be pouring at home this year Christmas vintages What’s prime for drinking: tips from our experts Vintage preview: Chablis 2021 Short supply, but classic styles in a tricky year. By Andy Howard MW Château Branaire-Ducru What makes this fourth-growth classic a St-Julien gem. Georgina Hindle World of Pinot Noir In a time of change: where ...
Kimberly Nicholas PhD (@KA_Nicholas) is a sustainability scientist at Lund University, and author of Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World Our 2020 research found that how fast we succeed at stopping warming will determine how much of the wine-growing regions and their characteristic varieties we love will remain in our lifetimes. Changing to warmer-climate varieties can help limit losses, but there are limits to adaptation. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. ...
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...