The role of a wine merchant is not to simply sell wine but to shine a light for collectors, enthusiasts and drinkers.

My indoctrination was a brutal one: blind tasting sessions with Greg Sherwood MW at Handford Wines, which was my first serious wine job, back in the mid 2000s. Greg opened wines from across the spectrum both in terms of price and geography; he was extremely open-minded and in no way label conscious. All wines were judged and understood in relation to their region and style. Greg drove us to get to the essence of the taste for each wine. First in order to guess what it was, and then, when the bottle was revealed, to understand the wine within the context of its region, vintage and ultimately the producer. It was a great discipline, rigidly enforced by Greg, who acted as the arbiter of taste. I remember being astonished by Greg’s precision when tasting, he was regularly able to draw out the characteristic in the wine which defined it and build from that point to identify the wine. Greg was sitting his MW around that time and he really was an impressive taster.

Handford Wines was and is, like all the best wine shops, full of wonderful wines with essentially no bad wine. However, there is a huge diversity of taste and we need the staff who work in these shops to taste and drink endlessly so that they can help guide us through the selection. During the Handford years, many of my friends thought we just drank all day (and there was a certainly an element of that) but the first duty of every wine merchant is to taste, drink and know every wine in his or her shop. In a shop like Handford that is a tough and ongoing challenge and it very nearly bankrupted both me and my friend and colleague, Jack. The reality is though, if you don’t have the knowledge you might as well just stick a vending machine on the wall.

With plenty of time to reflect and find my own way in wine, I look back on this time with probably slightly rose-tinted glasses. Greg took considerable delight in putting us ‘young-uns’ on the spot and it would be hard to argue that there wasn’t at least an element of sadistic pleasure on his part. I do, however, think his motivation was to educate us and most importantly to eradicate bullshit. After working in wine for a couple of years you start to feel like maybe you know something. Greg was there to remind us that we didn’t. We came to understand that we were embarking on a decades long exploration and that we would get the most out of the experience by being open and honest about what we were tasting and what we knew.

Above all else Greg had (and has) a passion for the wines of his homeland, South Africa. He showed us the potential of cabernet franc in South Africa through the wines of Bruwer Raats in particular. The clamour for good cabernet franc vineyards and grapes continues to grow. He showed us the possibilities of chenin blanc from the top end right down to good, solid, remarkably cheap drinkers. He introduced us to Eben Sadie, for me probably the wines that changed my perception of South African wine. Sadie got off the beaten track and started to work with old shrub vines, especially in the Swartland. Now a generation have left the manicured traditional vineyards of The Cape behind to look for a few 100 year old Cinsault vines on a rugged and overgrown hillside from which they make 600 bottles of wine in a mate’s winery. Sadie paved the way for the new faces of South African wine: Alheit, Badenhorst, Mullineux, Savage and a host of others. Time continues to move on, the Swartland is now established and winemakers are looking elsewhere for the next exciting, undiscovered gems. The atmosphere is electric and fresh with producers teaming up to formally work together or just helping each other out to accomplish the major tasks of winemaking i.e. picking and controlling the grapes from the vineyard to the winery. Not everybody has a winery and many of these guys don’t own the vineyards.

This new paradigm is replicated in parts of the West Coast of the US and in the hills of Northern Spain to name but two places. These new ways of working are increasingly the norm in the most exciting wine regions and are even feeding back into firmly established regions. We see micro-negociants springing up in the less obvious parts of Burgundy buying grapes and scratching together fresh, exciting wines from less charted terroirs. These guys care about terroir but not about the dogma that surrounds it. They also show that a good terroir is not enough, it matters a lot who makes the wine.

Out of the new wave, which are now more like established stars, Duncan Savage stands out to me. I love his understated approach. He describes his method of winemaking in a typically succinct way “do as little as possible, as much as you can”. For me, this perfectly sums up the duality of the winemaker and the wine.

Duncan’s white blend is the wine I reach for when I want to show somebody how good this guy is; most recently I have been drinking the 2016. The wine is a Bordeaux blend (sauvignon blanc and semillon) with, in 2016, a chunk of chenin blanc. In this wine Bordeaux, Burgundy and South Africa seem to meet. It has the upright, rigid spine of a Bordeaux white but with no new oak character. The warm old oak gently rounds the wine like an old school speaker softens a recording from the 60s or 70s, giving the wine layers but not heaviness. The wine is driven by citrus with zippy lime, and, more mellow lemon. This acidity naturally refreshes and frames the rich and complex layers. This remains a distinctly South African wine with a very clear imprint from the chenin but it pays homage to the wines which have inspired the style both in South Africa and from outside. The Savage White Blend 2016 brings together a whole bunch of different characteristics that I really love and somehow presents them harmoniously together. I do not know how Duncan does this but is it singular and brilliant and you won’t find a better white wine for the quite ridiculously low sum that is asked (£27.95 per bottle all in). I wouldn’t hesitate to open bottles young, indeed, I regularly do, but this will certainly reward ageing too.

It is no longer breaking news that the best South African wines are excellent or that there is a vibrant scene of young and young-at-heart winemakers. It is however increasingly clear that we are seeing an exciting, interesting scene develop into an established hierarchy with some producers already commanding very high prices and easily selling out on release i.e. Alheit. Now is the time to learn about and understand these wines if you want to drink them in the future. Some prices are already out of hand and I strongly believe we are just seeing the beginning.