Viewpoints from Chris:

“Thank you for life. When I met my wife, we got to see that we worked really well together. We had very similar ideas about winemaking, very similar tastes in wines. We started at point even. There were no grapes to make wine from, so we bought fruit from all over South Africa.

I started doing everything. I was the winemaker, the wineyard manager, the boss doing marketing. It was a bit crazy. 

When we started our winery we were making wine opposite the hotel in Riebekkastel. We made wine there for six years, and started in small. Eventually our building was becoming a bit too small for us. So we needed more space, and we actually started renting space in some of the wineries.

But then in 2012 our partner in our business said to us that he wanted to move on and do something else. So he wanted to sell his share in the winery. He said to Andrea: If you guys can find someone to take my place in the business, I am happy to sell to anybody. So we looked around, and spoke to many people, and then we met Sing. He had just bought a property in front of our land and wanted to start making wine there. It just worked out very well.

Singh was happy for entering and we helped him making his wine. Actually he could help us with our project to improve what we’re doing here. So for the last two years we’ve been making all of our new wines in this particular territory. We are now busy with plans to build a winery-concept on this property. But by now we are partly based in Franschhouk.

The Swartland revolution was actually  a festival - a two day event - started up in 2010. The purpose was to bring people to the area, to discover the wine and to explore the region. Nobody really knew what was interesting and thought the region already made big volumes of great interest, nationally and internationally. 2015 was actually the last one and “we” feel we have found our place in the wine-industry and that people know about the region. We started a group called Swartland Independent Producers  (SIP), and we designed a website to built an identity for the region.

For all of us it was an opportunity as a group of producers to work together along similar lines making wine that could be recognized  as part of our  region. So we said; let’s think about what works best here. We developed a unique and consistent story: A narrative revealed from Swartland  Independent Producers. You should know what you get when you’re buying wines from our region. It’s not about following fashion but establishing identity in our own way, created upon guidelines and types of grapes suitable to this place. There is a list of twentysix guidelines. In fact one of the rules are dealing with the fact that not more than twenty five percent of the grapes should come from abroad the region.
We’re trying to use larger format barrels, sort of five hundred and up to three thousand litres. We’re not going to move away from Oak completely, but we actually want to be more supportive to the wine. We never use a lot of new wood. And that is quite similar in the region. 

We use as little sulphur as possible. A wine that is over-wooded or doesn’t show a sense of place, and a wine that has no self or/and is cloudy, is not our aim or goal.

We need to add sulphur especially because eighty percent of our wines are exported. We respect our customers and we want them to have the same products that we believe we bottle. So we need sulphur. 

Our region is warm and dry. We have very interesting soils or terroirs, so we have a lot of different choices in winemaking!

When you walk out into our wineyards, you will see that the soil is very different to the one of Adi Badenhorst. Types of soil that lay ground for very different styles of wine. There are a variety of soils, but the climate in this coastal region is a dry warm climate. And they make very different styles whereever you are in Swartland.

We don’t only work with grapes from here. Mullineux buy goods from all over the region. We can then blend grapes from other places which have a lot of different texture. And then we blend them together to make really interesting wines. Some years we need grapes from the forest sites. It is never only one vignette, it’s a blend of many vineyards. The season is long and slow and the grapes have a long time to ripen. 

The region has become famous and well known. A lot of people are moving in buying property. And in this region there are a lot of people who have come in from from the outside. If you look at all the producers, I think maybe four or five of them are actually from this area.

We’ve needed this wineyard as a stable base for us. And that’s where Singh, we call him Bass, has been able to help us.

Bass is also a synonym for hospitality. We like working with him as he understands that we are experts. And he doesn’t get involved in everything, but he is really involved. He likes to see what is on the agenda to understand, because it’s interesting for him.

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