Why South Africa is thrilling the wine world

Tuesday, 7 July, 2015
Victoria Moore, The Telegraph
Victoria Moore discusses how winemaker Anthony Hamilton Russell is finally winning rich acclaim for his South African bottles

Back in the Eighties, anti-apartheid activists refused to buy Cape apples, though they might sometimes have been thwarted. “I remember working in an apple-packing shed,” says Anthony Hamilton Russell (AHR), a third-generation South African, “and they were happily putting on 'Produce of Israel’ stickers…”

Wine lovers might have boycotted many South African wines on grounds of taste as well as politics back then. With statutory power to control production areas, prices and yields, the KWV (Koöperatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika) imposed regulations favouring bulk wine growers, effectively strangling the initiative of all but the most determined small producer.

The story of wine is rarely just a story of grapes and vines, and South Africa’s is in some ways encapsulated by that of Hamilton Russell, a family estate making some of the country’s finest chardonnay and pinot noir.

After 21 years of democracy, South Africa has come of age to become one of the most thrilling wine countries in the world, planting in new places, harnessing the flavour of forgotten old vineyards, experimenting, discovering.

“There’s huge excitement at the top end, I guess more than £15 a bottle,” says Anthony. “And esoteric small production as a result of South Africa’s move away from large volumes.”

Tim Hamilton Russell, Anthony’s father, was a pioneer of South Africa’s modern wine industry. He bought land in Hemel-en-Aarde close to the Atlantic coastline, in 1975, planted vines in 1976 and made his first wine in 1981, supervising the operation from Johannesburg, where he owned and ran the advertising agency J Walter Thompson South Africa.

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