Last month, I wrote about our travels through Piedmont and Bolgheri. July finds us firmly home and in the depth of winter. Rondekop is bare and dormant and it is precisely now, with the fire lit in The Tasting Room, that one group of our people carries the whole story. This month, I want to write about our sommeliers.
Every person who pours wine in our Tasting Room is a graded sommelier. As far as I am aware, no other tasting room in the country can say that. It was a deliberate choice, and on paper an extravagant one, so it deserves an explanation. This month, we also welcomed Stefan Reinmuth back to Oldenburg Vineyards, where he rejoins our sales team. It is a fitting return, as Stefan helped shape the sommelier philosophy that defines The Tasting Room today.
Consider where you would normally meet a sommelier: in a fine restaurant, at the end of a wine’s journey, often years and continents from the vineyard that produced it. The sommelier is the final translator in a long chain — and usually the only one you ever meet. We have moved that translator to the source. When you taste wine at Oldenburg Vineyards, the person beside you can point through the window at the slope it grew on.
I use the word “translator” deliberately because it is the essence of the job. Nic’s winemaking philosophy is simple: let the terroir talk. But terroir speaks a complex language-; granite and iron-rich koffieklip, the hours of sun our amphitheatre takes off the day, and the twenty-degree swing between day and night. All of it ends up in the glass, yet very little of it can be interpreted unaided. Petronella, one of our original sommeliers, puts it better than I can. Her greatest pride is telling the story of Rondekop and how the hill shapes everything we bottle. After all these years, she still speaks about the wines with genuine awe. That is the job: take what is complex, make it understandable and fun, and always bring the story back to what is in front of you.
Ask our sommeliers what the work means, and no two answers are the same. For Gregory, our Head Sommelier, wine is history, science, and art bound together in a time capsule. Open a bottle, and you open a year. What the title does not mean, at least not here, is intimidation. The best of them listen before they pour.
If I sound proud of them, I have a good reason. Four of our team entered this year’s Best Young Sommelier of South Africa competition, and all four finished in the national top ten, including Keegan, who has only recently joined us, and Thabo. Gregory and Freda, our senior sommeliers, went further still, finishing among the final six at the Saxon in Johannesburg. To have two of South Africa’s six best young sommeliers come from one tasting room in the Banghoek is something rather special. Freda had never been on an aeroplane before the flight up to Johannesburg. What struck her most was the camaraderie among the competitors — the same thing that wine creates every day around the tables of The Tasting Room.
Huge congratulations to all four.
And in winter, they have more to translate than ever. The wines open in The Tasting Room right now were made from vines that look exactly like the bare ones outside the window — everything in the glass was earned in a season the guest never saw. A good sommelier closes that gap. They bring the summer back into the wine.
If you have not visited us in winter, I would argue it is the best time of the year to come: the valley green, the mountains occasionally dusted with snow, the fire lit in The Tasting Room, and our sommeliers with the time to tell the stories behind every bottle.
Come this winter and let them translate Rondekop for you.
Cheers,
Adrian Vanderspuy
Proprietor