South Africa

South Africa has an unbroken wine record from 1659, which is longer than every New World country and longer than most of Germany's commercial estates. Constantia, founded in 1685, made a sweet muscat wine that eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe ranked with Tokaji and paid accordingly. Napoleon had it sent to Saint Helena.

Chenin blanc, known locally as steen, is the most planted variety and covers more ground here than in its native Loire. Much of it was originally planted for brandy and for bulk, and the transformation of the last twenty years has come from producers seeking out old dry-farmed bush vine chenin in Swartland and Paarl and making it seriously. The Old Vine Project certifies blocks of 35 years and older with a seal that carries the planting date.

Pinotage is the country's own grape, a 1925 crossing of pinot noir and cinsaut made at Stellenbosch University. It has a poor reputation abroad, much of it earned in an era when it was over-cropped and roughly made, and it is now handled in two clear directions: a light, fresh, whole-bunch style, and a dense oaked style. Cape Blends put it alongside cabernet and merlot.

The Cape has a Mediterranean climate cooled by the cold Benguela current off the Atlantic and by the wind that locals call the Cape Doctor. The mountains are ancient, and the soils on decomposed granite and Table Mountain sandstone are among the oldest wine soils in the world. Drought is the recurring constraint: the 2015 to 2018 water crisis cut the vineyard area, which has not recovered.