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Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to spend time in one of South Africa’s most extraordinary wine regions — the Cederberg.
I was invited by winemaker and owner David Nieuwoudt to experience the estate during harvest.
It is difficult to properly describe the Cederberg until you have been there.
The isolation, the mountains, the altitude and the sheer scale of the landscape make it feel completely removed from the wine world we experience this side. And during harvest, everything is happening at once. Grapes are coming in, vineyards are being picked and another vintage is quite literally taking shape around you.
Between the early mornings picking grapes in the vineyards and the long hours in the cellar, it was an eye-opening experience. We followed wines through different stages of the process and got a much closer look at just how many small decisions go into making a great bottle of wine.
We got our hands dirty too. Punch-downs quickly became one of my favourite jobs. We also spent time cleaning tanks, scooping out skins, pumping wines over and hand-sorting grapes.
There’s something very different about discussing wine when you’re standing in the cellar, surrounded by the smells and sounds of harvest.
Between the cellar work, we got to experience the Cederberg itself.
Incredible hikes through the mountains, swims in natural springs, and all the fun stuff. There were moments where we looked around and realised just how remote and untouched this part of South Africa still feels.
You go there for the wine, but very quickly realise that the Cederberg itself is half the story.
This trip made the connection between the place and the wines very difficult to ignore.
What made it particularly special was having David there through so much of it. His family has been farming in the Cederberg for generations, yet there was never a sense that things were simply being done because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
There is constant innovation in the vineyards — testing different sites, experimenting and rethinking how they can keep pushing the wines forward.
For me, experiences like this are an important reminder of how much there still is to learn about wine.
We spend every day tasting it and talking about it. But being able to spend time with the people actually growing and making these wines — in the vineyards and cellar, during one of the most important periods of their year — gives you an entirely different perspective.
I also left with a real sense of how seriously Cederberg is taking its vineyards. There is an enormous amount of attention going into the sites, the fruit and what happens before the grapes ever reach the cellar.
And you can see it in the wines.
Cederberg has always been a special producer, but I genuinely believe the wines are only getting better.
I came home incredibly grateful for the opportunity.
Naturally, we tasted some remarkable wines throughout the trip — different vineyards, varieties and expressions of the Cederberg, as well as a few very generously opened Cape Winemakers Guild wines!
But after everything we tasted, there were two bottles I kept coming back to: Teen die Hoog Shiraz and Sandpoort Sauvignon Gris.
They were the wines I found myself talking about after the tastings were finished, and ultimately the two I came home wishing I could put in front of our own customers.
These aren’t ordinary Cederberg releases.
For years, these wines weren’t even available for public sale. They were made in tiny quantities and reserved for an extremely limited audience. Even today, production remains exceptionally small, and getting meaningful quantities of either wine is incredibly difficult.
That scarcity makes them interesting.
What was in the bottle made them unforgettable.
Teen die Hoog — a wine with the concentration and power you might expect from the Cederberg, but with remarkable detail and refinement.
Then there was Sandpoort Sauvignon Gris. Sauvignon Gris itself is something few South African wine drinkers encounter regularly, and it’s such a distinctive and serious wine.
Of everything we tasted during the trip, these were the two wines that stayed with me most.
A few months ago, I started asking David whether there was any possibility of getting some for the stores.
I’m very happy to say that we’ve managed to secure a small allocation of both wines for our Wine Club.
There isn’t enough to turn this into a massive promotion, and that isn’t really the point.
I’m so blessed to have travelled to the winelands so regularly this year, and with every trip I want to bring a little piece of an experience that meant a great deal to me back to our customers — and give some of the people who trust us with their wine buying the opportunity to taste the same bottles that impressed me.
I’m still learning about wine every day.
But I’m getting the hang of this thing lately.
Trips like this remind me why I love doing it.
Thank you to David Nieuwoudt and the entire Cederberg team for an experience I won’t soon forget.
Ben
