If there is one South African white wine I wish I had been buying a case of every year since its debut vintage, it’s Chris and Suzaan Alheit’s Cartology. Needless to say I ensure I buy it every year now. I’m therefore delighted to offer the beautiful new 2024 vintage to members, along with the Alheits’ Vine Garden white, single origin Huilkrans chenin and the phenomenal second vintage of Fogwell syrah.
Order by midday on Wednesday 8th October
Cartology is a seminal wine in the Cape’s modern-day wine story. Celebrating old bush-vine sites of chenin blanc (and semillon), which are all farmed without irrigation, it is a wine that helped to shift the South African wine industry’s perceptions about its old vineyards; the Alheits played a key role in ensuring that growers were paid more for the incredible fruit their historic plots yielded. It is a wine that, quite simply, is completely and unequivocally delicious and achieves that magical combination of drinkability, complexity and ageing potential – year in, year out.
Chris Alheit has rightly earned a reputation as one of South Africa’s pre-eminent chenin makers, a master of this chameleonic variety, initially with Cartology and subsequently with his highly sought-after single origin chenins, of which there are now four (we’re excited to offer the latest iteration of the formidable Huilkrans today). And, having purportedly said he would not make red wine again, he has now started working with syrah and, with just two vintages, has shown himself to be similarly adept with this grape.
The 2024 vintage of Fogwell syrah, released today, comes from what Chris describes as two of the best syrah vineyards in the country – one on the schist of the Swartland and one on the granite of the Polkadraai Hills in Stellenbosch – and it’s phenomenal, making a strong case for syrah being the finest red grape of the Cape. Like Cartology, Fogwell is a wine I am going to be buying a case of every year but this time I have started with its debut vintage and can build a complete collection. I hope you do the same!
The vintage conditions
The 2024 vintage was ‘low yielding across the board’ according to Chris, who sources from a multitude of different districts in the Western Cape, from the Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge in the Cape South Coast, to Citrusdal Mountain in Olifants River, north of the Swartland (where Huilkrans comes from). The Alheits harvested a mere ten tons off their 21-hectare Nuwedam farm in the Paardeberg, for example – less than one-third of a normal crop; the windy (and at times stormy) growing season impacted flowering and fruit set. It ended up being quite a dry year after the spring storms of September 2023, but while it was dry it ‘didn’t stress the vines too much.’ The fruit was, overall, healthy and concentrated.
The winemaking approach
The Alheits’ winemaking philosophy is underpinned by the drive to make ‘authentic wines which can’t be repeated in another place,’ says Chris. In practice, this means wild fermentation in neutral vessels, ‘nothing added, and nothing taken away… just the vineyard and a little bit of sulphur.’ Viewing a vineyard as a microbial culture coming into the winery, he wants to retain, as much as is possible, the purity of that vineyard’s expression.
