How the SA wine industry works

© Jennifer SternIn strict accordance with labeling procedures, the South African wine growing land is divided up into production units. Regions are the broadest division, eg coastal, and include districts and parts of districts.
Districts are recognizable geographical entities, such as Paarl or Stellenbosch. Wards are smaller areas within a district which display enough similarities to be grouped together. Cooperatives are, as the word suggests, co-operative ventures in which a number of wine growers in the same region send their grapes to a central place to be made into wine. Estates are the smallest units under the wines of origin scheme; generally these are farms that make their own wine. For the wine to carry the estate label all the grapes must be grown on the farm, and the wine made on the farm. Many estates buy in grapes from other farmers and produce excellent quality wines from them but they may not be labelled under the estate label. So you may wander in to an estate tasting room and find wines of two different labels made in the same place. This will be because one of the wines is made solely from grapes grown on the farm, while the other may contain grapes from a neighbouring farm.

Private producers make wine from grapes which do not all come from the farm. So they are not estates. Among the more established private producers is a growing number of garagistes – small independent wine makers, who sometimes literally make wine in their garages. But that doesn’t mean they don’t produce fine wine.