This is a new Wines Online series looking at South African garagiste wine makers – those amateur wine makers doing amazing things with grapes and pushing the envelop outside of a commercial winemaking operation. In a later article I’ll look more closely at the garagista movement, but to kick things off, here is an interview with one of my favourite garagiste winemakers – Tracy Phillips-Bryant, pictured left, from Stallion Ridge in Paarl.
I was lucky enough to meet Tracy earlier in the year when she hosted a wine and food pairing event with Perdeberg Wines. You can read here about how I got my mitts on a couple of bottles of her fabulous Shiraz. And today, happily, Tracy has stepped up to the plate in the first of my interviews with garagistas.
What exactly is a garagiste wine maker?
A garagiste wine maker is an amateur wine maker who creates wines in a micro setting from home, usually in his/her garage.
How did you end up as one?
My husband and I both from corporate backgrounds. My husband, Colin, is an ex-strategies consultant and I am an ex-banker. We purchased a wine farm in 2001 as a country retreat. After a few years of loving the country environment we decided to relocate to the farm and started doing the Cape Wine Academy courses. We planted a block of Shiraz and then, using the best grapes from our first harvest, and blended them with more mature awarding-winning grapes from a neighbour’s farm. And so we made the first Stallion Ridge Shiraz in 2004 together with our neighbour. The next year our neighbour started making his own label and my husband started getting involved in coroparte affairs and I began my real journey into becoming a garagiste.
What do you think garagistes bring to wine making that the traditional wine makers don’t?
Fastidious attention to detail in light of the small quantities made.
What is the most exciting thing about being a garagiste wine maker?
Being able to make wine to your own standard, with passion coming before profit or corporate requirements.
What is the most challenging thing about being a garagiste wine maker?
Sourcing all the necessary equipment to make and bottle wine in such small quantities.
Please describe your wine for us?
Stallion Ridge Shiraz is a hand-crafted wine … which is fruity, spicy and varies in intensity each year depending on the vintage conditions. But hopefully it is always a most enjoyable drinking experience!
What can we do to promote garagistes in South Africa?
Exposure, exposure, exposure!!
What is the biggest challenge facing the South African wine industry at the moment?
The Black Empowerment issue.
How do you think South African wine ranks internationally?
Unfortunately not as high as they should.
Talk to us about environmental issues in wine.
I think it is great that the industry is becoming more eco-friendly and aware.
What is your favourite wine that you have made?
The 2007 Stallion Ridge is going to be really special I am busy preparing to bottle it at the moment.
What are you drinking at the moment?
Stallion Ridge of course! Also enjoy tasting other New World wines whenever I can lay my hands on them.
Where can we get bottles of your wine?
From the farm, Dudleyvale in the Paardeberg, ontact phone number +27 21 971 1656 or e-mail: stallionridge@worldonline.co.za.
If you weren’t making wine, what would you be doing?
Probably involved in the corporate world.
If you are a garagiste wine maker and would like to be featured in a Wines Online Blog interview – please email me.
I just couldn’t resist bringing you this pic of Perdeberg’s (meaning horse mountain for our non-South African readers) latest addition. Merlot the Perdeberg Zebra will now meet and greet visitors to the winery from his new home at the cellar door of the Perdeberg Winery. Zebra used to roam the region and you’ll recognise Merlot from the Perdeberg wine bottles because the 66 year-old cooperative with 42 wine farms has always been “the one with the zebra”.
