Fairview Wines
Standing among the lavender beds in the terraced front garden of the winery, you’ll look out across rolling fields and see distant flat-topped Table Mountain, a world-famous landmark standing guard over the city of Cape Town. Fairview is based in Paarl and was originally know as Bloemkwoolfontein (Cauliflower Mountain) and has been in Charles Back’s family since 1937.
Charles Back has helped pioneer a modern culture of wine growing in South Africa that embraces typicity of terroir, unrestricted by ‘estate’ appellation, by both developing his own vineyards to their full potential and seeking out new viticultural sites to grow fruit for wines to please popular tastes and discerning palates. Charles Back’s philosophy is that wine is an integral and joyful part of everyday life. His unbridled enthusiasm, sense of fun and pure pleasure in growing vines, vinifying wine, and presenting it to wine lovers in all manner of exciting guises, pervades Fairview.
An old maturation cellar has been converted into a casual Mediterranean-styled indoor/outdoor eatery called The Goatshed. Included on the menu are Fairview’s own internationally award-winning farm style cheeses from their goat herd, some of whose members like to soak up the sun on the goat tower in front of the winery and as depicted on Fairview’s wine labels. Their antics have also been immortalised in the irreverently named, premium quality Goats do Roam range of wines.
The Fairview name guarantees a standard of quality, a distinctiveness of variety and origin, and an approachability that is a brand trademark. Ripe fruit is at the core of each and every wine, with wooding always done judiciously, invariably combining new oak with the use of second-, third- and fourth-fill barrels. Back and his winemaker Anthony de Jager keep the craft of winemaking simple: ‘Going back in winemaking is the way forward…’ Which translates into a belief in the basic, traditional methods of winemaking, aided by modern equipment and design, including sorting tables, basket presses, wooden fermenters, small tanks for individual vinification of particular vineyard blocks or sites.
The result is a portfolio of wines that falls deftly mid-way between New World fruit richness and showiness, and Old World tannic structure and elegance; Fairview’s wines always strive towards, and invariably achieve, a rare balance. What always sparks added interest is that with each new vintage, there is something new: whether it be the expression of the vagaries of the vintage, the discovery of a new vineyard site, the bottling of a new variety, the experimentation with a new way of melding fruit and wood.
The single vineyard wines are Fairview’s crowning achievement, their three single vineyard Shiraz, from the Beacon and Solitude blocks in Paarl and the Jakkalsfontein site in the warmer Swartland are outstanding. And although they are only 5km apart the Beacon and Solitude are starkly different wines. The bush vines grown on the rockier soil of the slightly elevated Beacon block make one of South Africa’s best Shiraz’s, while the trellised vines grown on the granite soil of the Solitude Block produce a fresher wine with great elegance though less power than the Beacon. Most powerful of them all is the Jakkalsfontein, yet it retains a rare elegance.
Fairview Wines, Suid-Agter-Paarl Road, Suider-Paarl 7646, South Africa
Tel: +27 (0)21 863 2450
Web: http://www.fairview.co.za
