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GRAPE GRO WING has led to aping the great winemaking styles of Europe. But there has not been any emphasis on what is uniquely South African wine. What I've set out to do here is to shake that kind of emulating mindset. I want to make wines that embody this place and no other." Sitting on the patio of the Solms-Delta restaurant, Fyndraai, diners look out on the towering, jagged violet-tinged Groot Drakenstein mountain range that rings the southern vista of glis- tening, gently arching vineyards. Inside, Fyndraai's interior glass floor covers the lit archaeological substructure of the 1740 wine cellar over which the restaurant was built. To make a radical break, Solms began reading up on Mediter- ranean winemaking techniques. His prodigious quest for knowl- edge led him to ancient Greek viticulture texts. "What was said time and again was that there are two ways to make wine—this way, for the masses, as we conventionally make it now, and that way, for the aristocracy, by strangling the stem, killing the stalk, leaving it only physiologically attached to the vine so that it de- hydrates and carries on ripening." The result, Solms con- tinues, is "a semi- raisined grape" that retains its acidity and sugar, and whose natural descendent is Ama- rone. According to an ancient Venetian saying that he came across, "A month on the rack is worth a week on the vine." SOuTH AFRICA Botswana Namibia Atlantic Ocean SOUTH AFRICA Wine Estate Cape Town Solms-Delta Indian Ocean Zimbabwe The collected wisdom suggested to Solms that ancient wine- makers actually preferred to leave the grapes to desiccate in the vineyards. They chose not to, he conjectured, because those luscious raisining grapes were prey to every animal and insect that could fly or walk. He expected a similar onslaught of preda- tory invaders when he first attempted to strangle his vines, but to his surprise the clusters survived unmolested—and they have remained undamaged through eight vintages from 2004 through 2011. "We've learned a great deal. Some varieties like Shiraz respond much more favorably than others. The thickness of the skin is crucial. Also, you don't want a grape that ripens too late in the season. On the white side, we've had the greatest success with Grenache Blanc." Desiccation leaves acidity By trapping the acidity of an early harvest at about 20° Brix, Solms-Delta vineyard workers desiccate the clusters without creating flabby wines that deliver unpleasantly jammy flavors; still, a sufficient sugar level ensures an adequate degree of phe- nolic ripeness. A single hard squeeze is applied to each rachis to damage the channels that communicate between berry and vine. On the following day a second team returns to the vineyard and re-crushes the same stems—but at a 90° angle to the previous day's action, taking care not to sever the bunches. All irrigation is stopped. Dry, windy conditions accelerate the dehydration. The natural acids are captured in the berries, along with the grape sugars; but during a period averaging four weeks, up to 40% of the water content evaporates. When the berries show the desired flavor profile, they are selectively picked. Special care is —Mark Solms, Solms-Delta Wine Estate "There has not been any emphasis on what is uniquely South African wine.... I want to make wines that embody this place and no other." taken that no berries fall off in the process; in their fragile state, they can easily separate from the stalks. The yield is remarkably low—two tons per hectare. That pencils out to 0.8 tons per acre. What Solms describes in detail is an exhausting process. I remark, naively, that crushing more than 20,000 stems twice each by hand with long-nose pliers must be enormously labor in- tensive. "It is!" Solms nods. "And massive unemployment is one of our major local conditions. I think it is a sin not to employ as many people as you can." Winemaker Hilko Hegewisch leads me through rows of desic- cated Shiraz vines shortly before harvest in mid-March. As he is about to show me a cluster he pauses to close his eyes and smile into a steady breeze that fluffs our hair. "That wind is called 'The Cape Doctor,'" he explains. "It sweeps away pollution, and it helps protect our desiccating grapes from mold and mildew. "We thought, 'How do we add value to the Shiraz?' In our Mediterranean climate, if you don't do anything to the Shiraz you can lose all its acid. You're left with high sugar levels, period—not so if you choke off the cluster early. But there was much more to learn through experimenting. 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