South African Wine Styles

South African wine is defined as much by its styles as by its grapes. Where the grape pages ask what is in the glass, the style pages ask how it was built — and the Cape has a distinctive shelf of answers: the Cape Bordeaux blend and the home-grown Cape Blend; traditional-method Cap Classique sparkling; a proud line of sweet and fortified wines descended from the historic Vin de Constance; and a fast-growing movement of old-vine and field blends drawn from some of the oldest working vineyards on earth. Learn these five and you can read a Cape wine list by ambition, not just by variety.

This is the styles wing of the South African wine encyclopedia. Below this essay you'll find a page for each style — start with the two great reds, which is where most of the confusion (and most of the best bottles) lives.

The two great reds — and why people confuse them

The single most useful distinction in Cape red wine is between the Cape Bordeaux blend and the Cape Blend. They sound alike and they are routinely mixed up, but they are opposites in intent.

A Cape Bordeaux blend is South Africa's version of a global template: a red built from the classic Bordeaux grapes — Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, sometimes rounded out with Malbec and Petit Verdot — almost always Cabernet-led. It is the Cape competing directly with the rest of the world on the world's own terms, and it competes very well. Kanonkop's Paul Sauer is the touchstone, with Meerlust Rubicon, Vilafonté and De Toren close behind. This is the idiom that made Stellenbosch South Africa's First-Growth address.

A Cape Blend does something no one else can: it puts Pinotage, the only grape the Cape invented, at the centre of a serious red blend, backed by Bordeaux varieties or Shiraz. The convention — argued over more than legislated — is a meaningful proportion of Pinotage, roughly a third to a half, enough that the wine tastes of the Cape's own grape rather than merely borrowing it.

A Cape Bordeaux blend is South Africa speaking the world's language fluently. A Cape Blend is South Africa speaking its own.

The practical test at the shelf is simple: if there's Pinotage in the blend and it matters, it's a Cape Blend; if it's Cabernet, Merlot and Cabernet Franc alone, it's a Cape Bordeaux blend.

Cap Classique — the Cape's answer to Champagne

South Africa makes some of the New World's most convincing traditional-method sparkling, and it has its own name for it: Cap Classique, often written Méthode Cap Classique or simply MCC. The method is identical to Champagne's — a second fermentation in the bottle, extended time on the lees, the same fine mousse — but South African producers cannot use the word "Champagne," so in 1992 the industry adopted Cap Classique as its own term of art.

The style is older than the name. The first was Simonsig's Kaapse Vonkel, released in 1973 from the 1971 harvest; Graham Beck is the modern benchmark, poured at both Nelson Mandela's inauguration and Barack Obama's victory celebration. Most Cap Classique is built on Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, grown increasingly in cool sites like Robertson and the Elgin and Hemel-en-Aarde highlands, and at its best it delivers Champagne's savoury, biscuity complexity for a fraction of the outlay.

The sweet and fortified tradition

The Cape's oldest claim to greatness is sweet. Three centuries ago, the unfortified Muscat wine of Constantia was shipped to the courts of Europe and namechecked by Napoleon, Jane Austen and Baudelaire; revived by Klein Constantia as Vin de Constance, it remains one of the world's benchmark dessert wines. It anchors a broad and often-overlooked seam of Cape sweetness covered on the dessert wines page:

• Vin de Constance-style Muscat — luscious but unfortified, made from late-picked, shrivelled Muscat de Frontignan; the historic style of Constantia.
• Noble Late Harvest — botrytis-affected sweet wines, the Cape's answer to Sauternes, often from Chenin Blanc.
• Straw wine (strooiwyn) — grapes dried on mats or racks to concentrate the sugar before pressing.
• Muscadel — fortified Muscat, red or white, a historic Robertson and Klein Karoo speciality.
• Cape "port" — Portuguese-variety fortified reds in Ruby, Tawny, Vintage and Late Bottled Vintage styles, prefixed "Cape" under trade-naming rules and centred on Calitzdorp.

None of these is a mass-market category, and that is precisely why they reward the curious: they are among the best-value fine wines the Cape makes.

Old vines and field blends — the movement underneath

The style that has done most to change how the world sees South African wine isn't a blend recipe at all — it's an idea: that the Cape's genuinely old vineyards are a resource no one else has at this scale. Through the Old Vine Project, wines from vines 35 years and older can carry a Certified Heritage Vineyards seal that prints the year the vines were planted. The fruit — much of it old-bush-vine Chenin Blanc, but also Cinsaut, Grenache and Sémillon — gives a depth and low-yield concentration that young vineyards can't fake.

Out of this comes the Cape's most exciting whites and a revival of the field blend: a vineyard co-planted with several varieties, picked and fermented together, in the old Cape manner. It is a style built on heritage rather than a rulebook, and it runs through the Swartland's new wave as much as through Stellenbosch's grand old estates.

How this wing is organised

Each style below gets its own page — what defines it, how it tastes, and the producers who set the standard. Start with the two reds, since Cape Bordeaux blend versus Cape Blend is the distinction that unlocks the rest; then read across to Cap Classique and the dessert wines. To follow the styles back to the grapes and the places that grow them, go up to South African wine or across to Stellenbosch.