What is Muratie best known for?

Two things that sit oddly together. Its port-style fortified wines are among the Cape's benchmarks for the style. And the Ansela van de Caab, a Bordeaux-style red named for the freed slave who married the estate's first owner — a rare thing to hang your grandest wine on. Then there's the cellar itself: deliberately left unrestored, cobwebs, dust and dark old portraits included.

Why are there cobwebs in the Muratie tasting room?

They're kept on purpose. Where most estates polish their cellars to a showroom shine, Muratie leaves the patina alone — candle-smoked walls, layered dust, spiders in their corners. Part atmosphere, part statement. This is a farm that has been making wine since the seventeenth century, and it would rather show its years than hide them.

Is Muratie related to Kanonkop?

Historically, yes. The two Simonsberg neighbours were once part of the same land and trace back to the same early Cape farms. Today they're separate, independently owned estates — Muratie run by the Melck family, Kanonkop by the Kriges. Taste them the same afternoon; they're minutes apart.

Do you need to book a tasting at Muratie?

Book ahead, especially over the summer high season (November to February) and if you want to eat at the estate's table. Reserve through Muratie's own website, where current visiting details are kept up to date.

Muratie Wine Estate

Walk into Muratie's cellar and you'll assume the cobwebs are staged. They aren't. This is one of the oldest wine estates in South Africa, folded into the Simonsberg in the northern reaches of Stellenbosch, and it has spent three centuries refusing to look its best. Candle-smoke on the walls. Dust left where it fell. Portraits gone dark. Muratie has been making wine since the late seventeenth century, and it wears every one of those years on purpose — which is exactly why you should go.

Start with the name on the flagship bottle, because it tells you what kind of place this is. In 1685 the land was granted to Lourens Campher, a German soldier turned farmer. He fell for Ansela van de Caab, a freed slave, and — the story goes — walked the long road over the mountain to see her for years before she was released and they could marry and farm together. The estate's grandest red still carries her name. Not a founding patriarch. A freed slave woman. Muratie does it without a word of fanfare, and it should.

The families and the patina

Ownership has passed through some vivid hands, and each left a mark you can still see. The Melck family — descendants of the eighteenth-century Cape magnate Martin Melck — held the farm early on. In the twentieth century it came to Georg Paul Canitz, a German-born artist who fell for the place, revived its vineyards, and, with the legendary viticulturist Abraham Perold, became one of the first people to plant Pinot Noir in South Africa. His paintings still hang in the tasting room, darkened by decades of smoke and dust.

Then, in the late 1980s, Ronnie Melck — a former head of Stellenbosch Farmers' Winery, a Melck by blood — bought Muratie back, reuniting the estate with the family that had farmed it two centuries earlier. His descendants run it today.

Most estates polish their cellars to a showroom shine. Muratie keeps the spiders.

That refusal to renovate is the signature, more than any single wine. The tasting room is dim, low-beamed, hung with old portraits, thick with cobwebs left deliberately in place. It reads as theatre for about ten minutes. Then it reads as honesty — a farm that would rather show its age than costume itself as new.

The wines

Reach for the fortified first. The Cape Vintage — the port-style and dessert wines Cape producers make in the Portuguese manner — is one of the reference bottles for the style in South Africa: dense, spiced, built to age for years in the bottle. The amber-hued jerepigo, a lighter and intensely sweet fortified, is a long-standing cult favourite. These are wines to end a meal on, or to pour beside something dark and bitter — which is precisely why Muratie belongs in the chocolate-and-wine conversation.

The dry reds are serious too. The Ansela van de Caab is the estate's Bordeaux-style blend — Cabernet Sauvignon-led, with Merlot and Cabernet Franc — structured, savoury, the wine the estate reaches for when it wants to show what its slopes can do. The George Paul Canitz Pinot Noir nods to the artist who first planted the grape here: quieter and more delicate than the big fortifieds, and a piece of living history in the glass. Round it out with a Shiraz named for Ronnie Melck, a Chardonnay, and a white blend under the Laurens Campher label, and you've got a full table.

The setting and the visit

Muratie sits on the Knorhoek road at the foot of the Simonsberg, minutes from its neighbour Kanonkop, on some of the most storied ground in Stellenbosch wine country. The drive in is all oak avenue and mountain; the buildings are whitewashed Cape Dutch gone gently to seed in the best possible way.

Here's the move: taste in that famous unrestored cellar, then stay for the table. Muratie keeps one — the kind of long, unhurried Cape lunch that turns a tasting stop into an afternoon, and the reason to build your day around this estate rather than squeeze it between two others. Book ahead over the summer high season, when the Simonsberg estates fill fast, and check the estate's own site for current details before you travel. This is not the slickest cellar door in Stellenbosch. That's the whole point.

What to buy

One bottle home, make it the Cape Vintage — Muratie at its most distinctive, and it will outlive most of the reds in your rack. For the estate at full stretch among the dry reds, the Ansela van de Caab, and the name worth knowing. And if you want something rarer, the George Paul Canitz Pinot Noir carries a genuine slice of South African wine history in the glass.