Guild’s wines cross new threshold

Thursday, 29 September, 2016
winewizard.co.za, Michael Fridjhon
When it comes to celebrating the wines of the Cape Winemakers Guild, in the past I have been more diffident than enthusiastic. In the very early days of the Guild – back in the 1980s – we were all quite excited about the advent of craft winemaking in the Cape.

However, as the Guild came of age and prices at the annual auction started to move dramatically upwards, the question of what was really attracting the premium became an issue. Suddenly it was important to question if these “rare” wines were all they were cracked up to be.

From the mid-1990s onwards the primary point of difference between the producers' standard offering and what was consigned to the Guild auction was an extra dollop of oak. Then more recently, the extra oak came with a sense of even more “pushing-the-envelope” ripeness – in other words, playing chicken with the balance in order to squeeze ever greater opulence into the offering. It worked as a strategy. Prices have risen year on year and the smaller volume sale now achieves turnovers which dwarf the longer established Nederburg auction.

In the past year or two there has been a marked improvement in the overall quality, with fewer faults, more savoury fruit, less visible oak. There also emerged a more palpable qualitative difference between the auction wine, and the cellar's regular bottling – and this was reflected in the prices achieved at the annual sale. Clearly the premium was both a function of enhanced product quality and the special release sales environment – which is in the nature of the luxury goods market: buyers with that kind of loot should be adult enough to know how far to go. At least from this point onwards there was the beginning of a correlation between price and value.

To read more online, click here.