Young or old, winemakers only have so many chances to get it right

One of the problems confronting dedicated winemakers is they have only limited time to pursue their craft: one vintage a year, one chance every 12 months to manage the growing season, the harvest, the winemaking. Since the difference between good wine and great wine — all other things being equal — lies in infinitesimal tweaks, they need to know everything about everything: soil, vines, pruning, harvesting, small-batch fermentation, choice of barrels, time in oak — all the science, all the accrued knowledge. You also need the time to watch what you’ve made evolve in bottle. Sometimes you only realise, years down the line, that you have to change how you’ve always been pressing the fruit or managing the fermentation.

If, like Pieter Ferreira, you get to run a cellar from your early thirties, maybe you have 40 chances to get it right. Some vintages will never make great wine, so you do what you can, but they were never in the running. At best you can hope for five or six attempts to achieve vinous perfection.

New wineries usually have young winemakers. Old wineries often have older winemakers. There’s little surprising about this. Recently graduated wine buffs try to define their own aesthetic — think any of the rock-star establishments created in SA in the past two decades — so they build to embody their vision. Eben Sadie left Spice Route to create his enterprise; the Mullineuxs left Tulbagh Mountain Vineyards to develop their eponymous cellar.

The other side of the equation is less obvious: if a winemaker grows into his job at a long-established cellar he doesn’t need to move. Proprietors attribute real value to their years in the job. Usually there’s a succession plan, where the sometime assistant/junior becomes “winemaker” and the former winemaker becomes “cellarmaster”. As long as complacency doesn’t compromise output, having access to the years of experience can be worth more than the excitement of new blood.

Still, a few decades in the same position can take the edge off performance: you have the experience, but do you have the hunger? I guess the answer must be on a case-by-case basis. If the winemaker is Ferreira, who joined Graham Beck in time to see the completion of the cellar and who has made every vintage of Graham Beck bubbly ever produced, the answer is clearly yes. If anything, he is more passionate about what he does than ever before: he now knows more about bubbly, and can see ways of producing better and better fizz.

Fizz is about the longest game in the business. You start with base wine, which in oenological terms is earlier than a newborn, and you have to compose the final blend and end result before it has a chance to evolve. Then it’s trapped forever in a bottle where the only possible tweak is the liqueur d’expedition. Since fizz can keep for 50 years, you’ve got to aim straight at the beginning of its trajectory if you want a say in how it will look down the line.

As part of the 30th-anniversary celebrations, Graham Beck has released a special magnum. For the tasting that launched it we sampled the 2015 Pinot Noir Rosé, the 2016 Blanc de Blanc, the 2014 Brut Zero and the 2015 Cuvée Clive. Of the lineup, the rosé was certainly the standout wine. It had fabulous black cherry aromas and enough brioche character to deliver complexity behind the fruit. The Cuvée Clive, which I sometimes find insufficiently expressive, opened beautifully. Tasted alongside the other wines you really get the statement of style, the depth and breadth of palate weight.

There’s no doubt that Ferreira is a master of the craft: he’s guided the Graham Beck fizz business from zero to its rightful place as a market leader. At 30 years old, the brand has become an SA icon and, increasingly, a player on the world stage.