‘If you have to choose just one grape in the Cape,’ Eben Sadie says to me, as we approach the new releases of his trilogy of chenin blancs, ‘it would have to be chenin.’ While we shouldn’t take this too literally – Eben is a passionate advocate for expanding South Africa’s varietal diversity – his comment holds a simple truth: chenin blanc has a longstanding and deep affinity with the country’s ancient soils.
When a country’s plantings are overwhelmingly dominated by one variety, ‘you are bound to plant a couple of vineyards in the right place,’ Eben goes on to say. ‘The fact that so much chenin was planted between the 1940s and ‘60s meant that some amazing sites were established.’
Because chenin is so widely planted, we now know – even if by chance rather than by design – where it produces exceptional, mesmerising wines, and there are certainly more than ‘a couple of vineyards in the right place!’ This knowledge has opened the South African wine industry’s eyes up to the importance of the variety/place relationship. The desire and drive to get this right, a charge led by the 21st-century New Wave movement, is now evidenced across the Cape’s various wine regions and grape varieties and is responsible for much of the dynamism of today’s fine-wine landscape.
An honest grape
Chenin is ‘a hell of an honest grape,’ to borrow the words of one of the Cape’s most accomplished chenin makers, Chris Alheit, who describes chenin as ‘super-transparent’ in articulating both site and vintage. Chris makes his chenin by taking the same approach on each site – wild fermentation in neutral vessels with around 12 months’ yeast-lees ageing – enabling us to directly compare the wine’s terroir differences side by side. ‘Our winemaking philosophy is really, really simple and, I’d like to say, quite pure,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing added or taken away, there are no clever tricks; it’s just the vineyard and a little bit of sulphur.’
Chris works with chenin grown in four districts, sourcing variously from parcels in Stellenbosch (Bottelary and False Bay), the Swartland (Malmesbury and the Paardeberg), Citrusdal Mountain (Piekenierskloof and Skurfberg) and Cape Town (Tygerberg). The range of guises chenin wears on these various terroirs (and, additionally, Bot River, Cederberg, Montagu, Paarl, Polkadraai Hills, Slanghoek and Wellington), with their different soil types, climates and elevations, is incredibly exciting for lovers of wines with a distinct sense of place. ‘Chenin is a tremendous vehicle for expressing the land if you are trying to transmit the character of the vineyard and nothing else,’ Chris adds.
Never been asked to dance
The Cape’s present-day chenin story is intimately entwined with its old-vine story. The rediscovery, restoration and subsequent preservation of old chenin vineyards have brought us an exhilarating roll call of limited-production, highly collectable gems. This movement has two pillars: the first is the tireless work of viticulturist Rosa Kruger in tracking down promising old plots of vines and connecting the growers with winemakers she trusted to care for the vineyards, which led to the launch of South Africa’s Old Vine Project (OVP) in 2016; the second is the vision and determination of the new-wave producers to express South Africa’s landscape.
Duncan Savage’s ‘Never Been Asked to Dance’ is from a tiny bush-vine vineyard on the border of Paarl and Stellenbosch, planted in 1956 on granitic soils. This chenin had never been bottled on its own and given the chance to shine until Duncan stepped in. ‘This beautiful old block had been earmarked for being pulled out,’ he says. ‘Our plan was to resurrect it, and now it’s going from strength to strength. We knew it was old when we took it on, but we didn’t know it was the fourth-oldest chenin vineyard in South Africa.’
Standing between the vine rows in the early evening as the setting winter sun blazes in the sky, I can feel why this vineyard grabbed Duncan; it has a quiet yet powerful aura of its own. This one hectare yielded a mere 349kg of grapes when he first picked it in 2017. With careful farming – hand-weeding, mulching, interplanting with young vines – Duncan and his team (which includes viticultural consultant and old-vine expert Jaco Engelbrecht) have increased the output to 3-5 tons per harvest. The metaphor of never having been asked to dance resonates; the Cape’s contemporary wine producers, with their ambition for and curiosity about terroir transmission, have invited previously anonymous old chenin vineyards to dance, and to express their own vinous identity.
The history of Cape chenin
From Cinderella to belle of the ball
Known as steen until it was identified as being the same grape as Loire chenin blanc in the 1960s, this grape has a long association with the Western Cape and deep affinity with its ancient soils. In fact it was believed to be chenin (together with muscat) that was made into the first 14.5 litres of Cape wine in 1659! With its generous yields and naturally high acidity, by the second half of the 20th century, steen was treated as a workhorse variety, accounting for 35% of all vines planted by 1990. Almost four centuries of heritage and the grape’s ubiquity – meaning that it now accounts for almost half of the Cape’s old vines – has led to a wealth of incredible wines of place, as contemporary winemakers seek out site expression across a rich tableaux of terroirs.
Must-know chenin terroirs
Chenin’s capacity to convey place can be understood with even the most cursory of summaries of South Africa’s must-know chenin terroirs.
On the decomposed granite of the Swartland’s Paardeberg, chenin articulates itself as steely, nervy and linear (as evidenced in Mullineux Granite and Sadie Family Rotsbank) – even austere in its youth. Similarly, on the granite-rich soils of the Polkadraai Hills in Stellenbosch, with their False Bay cooling influence, it shows tension and vivid acidity, as well as a bright, luminous energy, achieving surprising intensity at modest alcohol levels. Raats and Reyneke are benchmarks but check out Carinus too. The old vineyards on the shallow granite of the Rustenhof farm in Firgrove (which is even closer to False Bay than the Polkadraai Hills) produce incredible wines like Alheit Nautical Dawn and Scions of Sinai Granietsteen - wines which have laser-beam focus and often a distinctive salinity, together with weight and resonance. On schist sites in the Swartland, chenin can offer more generosity, texture and breadth than on granite – and often a tactile tannin presence; textbook examples include Mullineux Schist and Rall Ava.
The wild and remote terrain of the Citrusdal Mountain district, north of the Swartland, is home to the undisputed, if unofficial, grand cru of Skurfberg and to some of the Cape’s most thrilling chenins. At 450m and higher, on farms that principally grow rooibos tea and citrus, the soils are predominantly decomposed Table Mountain sandstone, and the wines born from this rugged landscape often have a wild-herb perfume (fynbos – a native shrub – is the more accurate descriptor), an earthy minerality, and significant structure; the best emit a raw, reverberating power.
Skurfberg yields fewer than 50,000 bottles across the different producers but has achieved a near-mythical status for South African wine lovers, partly on account of scarcity but mostly thanks to its formidable wines. While Sadie Family Skurfberg, Alheit Magnetic North and Huilkrans are all incredibly limited, if you want to get a taste of this terroir, try Ginny Povall’s Botanica Mary Delany Collection (which is exceptional yet somehow flies under the radar despite debuting with the 2009 vintage) and newcomer Nuschka de Vos’s Vulpes Velox – another electrifying example of this place, in just its second articulation with the 2024 vintage.
Then there is the Mev Kirsten vineyard in Stellenbosch, which sits on heavier soil than both the Paardeberg and Citrusdal Mountain, with sandstone and granite formations over a deep clay subsoil. First employed by Eben Sadie in the 2006 vintage, this is a small standalone site – but as South Africa’s oldest recorded chenin block it demands inclusion in this whistle-stop tour of the Cape’s chenin terroirs. Now being carefully interplanted with young vines, replacing the dead and dying, this vineyard still has an old soul and is arguably gaining in complexity. Always the last of their vineyards to be picked, it has the longest growing season of Eben’s chenins and, he says, the biggest differential between the ripeness of the berries.
Another distinctive South African chenin, which deserves mention for being one of the ‘OGs’ of Cape chenin blanc’s riveting modern era is Sebastian Beaumont’s Hope Marguerite, first made in the 1997 vintage when there were only two other chenins going into bottle as varietal wines. From Beaumont Family’s two oldest chenin blocks, planted in 1974 and 1978 respectively, this often has a little residual sugar, a powerful and broad structure, underpinned by tangy acidity. While it isn’t trying to be anything other than itself, it reminds me in some respects of the great chenins of the Loire’s Anjou. It’s a wine that ages formidably.
Site specificity
Chenin has been at the forefront of the new wave’s exploration of single-origin wines over the last 15 years. David and Nadia Sadie make four Swartland chenins from registered single vineyards, all of which carry the Old Vine Project’s Certified Heritage Vineyards seal, despite having originally intended to make just two wines (one white and one red). The first pair of single vineyards, Hoë-Steen and Skaliekop, debuted with the 2014 vintage. David says that Nadia took ‘a lot of convincing’ that they should go down the single-vineyard route, ‘but obviously I won the fight. There’s a beauty to celebrating a single vineyard.’
The couple’s two original single-vineyard wines brought different soil types into their repertoire, which produced different styles of chenin. ‘We weren’t working with any clay or shale vineyards before 2014. Our chenin vineyards were based on the Paardeberg’s granite and were quite mineral, tense wines. Suddenly, we had these wines with a broader palate and more structure. The clay-rich soils of Hoë-Steen brought texture and power, while the shallow shale of Skaliekop has a different mid-palate profile, with a lot of lateral tension. They stood out and justified being bottled on their own.'
David is quick to acknowledge that ‘he was not a pioneer in his own region,’ referencing the Mullineux and their Single Terroir Chenins. Adi Badenhorst – one of the original Swartland revolutionaries alongside Andrea and Chris Mullineux, Marc Kent and Callie Louw and Eben Sadie – was specifically the inspiration for the Sadies to start bottling their Paardeberg Plat’bos plot as a single vineyard in 2018, to better comprehend its granitic profile. Adi’s different granite chenin bottlings (which, ironically, he has now pulled back from!) ‘gave us the confidence to bottle another granite chenin that was distinctly different from our main chenin,’ David says. The husband-and-wife team visibly relish the intellectuality of being immersed in a specific site; they work with a Burgundian attention to detail, only bottling a vineyard on its own when they have farmed it themselves and understood its nuances, and, crucially, when they believe it has something to say. David explains how important it is ‘to have farming control’; learning ‘which parts of the soil have wetter pockets and ripen later’ is crucial to their tailored viticultural approach, affecting their choice of cover crops or mulching regime and, ultimately, having an impact on grape and wine quality.
Multi-regional magic
Chenin’s Cape identity can also be explored at the multi-regional level. Alheit Cartology (which includes a splash of semillon, another important heritage variety in South Africa) flies the flag for blending, with fruit sourced from nine 40- to 60-year-old sites. Year in, year out, since its 2011 maiden vintage, Cartology is a wine of many dimensions, balancing richness and concentration with energy and tautness, and capable of long ageing; the 2013 was on fire and still so youthful when I drank it a year ago. This year (2026) sees the release of their 15th vintage of Cartology with the 2025, which will be available to members as a First Release later in August. When Chris established the business in 2010 with his wife Suzaan, the couple deliberately chose old, unirrigated, bush-vine chenin as their route to bottling what he calls ‘uniquely South African wines that can’t be repeated in another place.’
It is this unrepeatable identity, multidimensional and chameleonic, that is South African chenin’s most compelling quality; in contrast to many other countries’ chardonnays, pinots and cabernet-based blends that often (understandably) gaze France-wards, it isn’t trying to imitate another region. Instead, the best of South African chenin is fiercely and authentically itself.
