MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Oscar goes to Richard Kershaw for his Elgin chardonnays

Visits of winemakers to Johannesburg are not everyday events, despite that Gauteng is the world’s biggest market for Cape wine. This is a great pity for many reasons, not least of which is that when they occur, wine is opened and people seem to find the world a better place. It’s safe to assume that if the visitors were hawking other consumables — bread, cheese and soup powder, for example — the occasions would be a lot less jolly.

Some of this obviously has to do with wine being more likely to induce a state of cheerfulness than dehydrated vegetables with a faint whiff of chicken. It may also be that people who gravitate to the world of wine are probably more fun than your average soup salesperson.

It’s unusual to come across dull people in the wine trade: nerdy, yes, so sometimes overly focused on what makes their particular patch of dirt exceptional, but never dull. A strong candidate for the Oscar in this category would be Richard Kershaw MW (master of wine), best known for his Elgin chardonnays and no slouch regarding pinot and syrah.

I doubt there is anyone in South Africa more obsessed with understanding the component elements of the perfect chardonnay. He has been doing this for long enough that what we now see coming together is nothing less than exceptional. Kershaw chose Elgin for his project because in his mind it was indisputably the coolest region (climatically, as opposed to fashionably) to establish the vineyards destined to produce South Africa’s best chance of a world-class wine.

He then set about planting different chardonnay clones on sites best suited for their potential. He’s been making wines from several of these vineyards for more than a decade, while new plantings (some with different clones) come into production. His “laboratory” now arguably has all the material it needs. (Incidentally, there are also some very good pinots and syrahs made with the same meticulous attention to detail and with the same objective in mind.)

Kershaw’s latest releases are starting to reach the market. They include four single-site, single-clone selections: two on Bokkeveld shale, one on ironstone, and one on sandstone. New to me was the clone 76 (Kogelberg sandstone), which I found intriguing, almost steely, yet with a quite generous whiff of orange blossom, and well worth tracking how it will evolve. Both of the older Bokkeveld shale blocks (clone 95 and 96) now yield splendid wine.

In addition to his single-site bottlings, there are the wines he calls “clonal selections” in which he has combined clones (as would happen in Burgundy, where traditionally vignerons replanted their vineyards using the massale selection of all the clones in the older blocks). These sell for half the price of the single-clone wines and, in the case of the 2023 clonal selection chardonnay at least, are comfortably worth their more than R600 price tag.

Kershaw could risk being in Johannesburg in January: in cool-climate Elgin the vintage is still some time away. Abrie Beeslaar booked his January Gauteng launch event expecting he would be able to squeeze it in ahead of the vintage; instead, he was compelled to direct his crush over the phone while he chatted about his wines.

He needn’t have worried — his wines spoke well enough for themselves. His 2023 pinotage has come together very well (as one might expect of the man who created the Kanonkop Black Label): fragrant, supple and lithe. His entry-level red blend, Cape Courage, made with cabernet sauvignon, pinotage and merlot, is simply delicious and worth every cent of its R235 price tag. But it’s his chardonnay selling at R440 that I thought stole the show: zesty lemon blossom and lime notes, melded with the faintest of caramel hints, linear and precise. It’s destined to be a Cape classic. In an alternative strategy to Kershaw’s single-site focus, Beeslaar has assembled a multiregional blend in which the whole is greater than the sum of many parts.