The Old-Vine Renaissance

Something remarkable has happened in South African wine over the past three decades. Since the early 1990s the country’s focus has shifted steadily from volume towards quality, provenance and regional expression, and a new generation of growers and winemakers has been questioning established conventions, exploring cooler areas, reducing yields and farming with far greater care.

Among the most important threads of that transformation is the rediscovery of the Cape’s old vineyards. Many were originally planted for high-volume production and were never intended to become treasures. Yet their age has become their gift. Low yields, deep root systems and long adaptation to their sites allow these old vines to produce wines of exceptional concentration, texture and individuality, and regions such as the Swartland have built much of their modern identity on them.

No variety tells this story more completely than Chenin Blanc. Once widely associated with inexpensive commercial production, Chenin has been transformed by the recognition and preservation of old vines, and it is now regarded as one of South Africa’s most important fine-wine varieties. The change has been about perception as much as farming: the world looked again at vineyards it had overlooked, and found something it could not find anywhere else.

The Cape’s geology plays its quiet part. These are some of the world’s most ancient wine-growing soils, granite, shale and sandstone formations weathered over hundreds of millions of years. They drain well, naturally moderate the vine’s vigour and reward deep roots, which is precisely what an old vineyard possesses.

Age has become the Cape’s gift: old vines, ancient soils and wines that could come from nowhere else.

Our own Oniv is a child of this renaissance. The 2023 Oniv Chenin Blanc was created in collaboration with Danie Steytler, Tertius Boshoff and the talented teams at Kaapzicht and Stellenrust, two family estates in the Bottelary Hills of Stellenbosch where old Chenin runs deep. At Stellenrust, established in 1928, cooling afternoon breezes and decomposed granite soils sustain a significant collection of mature, dry-farmed bush vines, fruit of natural concentration that keeps its freshness and acidity. At Kaapzicht, the Steytler family still farms a Chenin Blanc vineyard planted in 1947 by Danie’s great-grandfather, now just over a hectare in size and the second-oldest surviving Chenin Blanc vineyard in South Africa.

Danie and Tertius both inherited history and chose to work with it rather than under it, interpreting established vineyards with a thoughtful, contemporary approach that lets each site keep its character. That balance, heritage held lightly, is exactly what drew us to the Bottelary Hills.

This, to us, is the meaning of the old-vine renaissance. It is not nostalgia. It is the recognition that some answers take generations to grow, and that the vineyards planted by earlier hands are now speaking with a clarity the world has finally begun to hear.

Taste where the story leads, discover the wines.