Avondale Wine

The Free Bacchus Story

Johnathan Grieve was studying to be an art major when his parents bought a 160-hectare farm outside Paarl in 1996. By his mother Ginny’s account, the only farming he had ever done was selling the family’s vegetables to the neighbours, something he started at the age of three. He released the first wine under the Avondale label in 1999. A year later a fire swept down the mountains over the farm, and the rebuilding that followed is where his organic and biodynamic farming began.

The pest control has feathers. A flock of Pekin ducks works the rows eating the snails that would otherwise damage the vines, and predatory wasps and beneficial bacteria handle much of the rest. The farm has thirteen soil types, and the vines are grown in one-hectare blocks, each planted with the grape that suits the soil beneath it. At harvest every block is fermented on its own, with the yeasts that come in on the fruit, before anything is blended.

Twelve grape varieties grow here, from Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot to Chenin Blanc, Roussanne and Viognier, and several of the wines are blends, like the five-grape white called Cyclus. The cellar, built in 2003, sits two storeys underground in an old dry riverbed, so the wine can move by gravity and the earth keeps it cool.

Control Union, a Dutch certifier, audits the vineyards and the cellar. On the US organic register the farm has been certified since June 2009 across 327 acres, with every grape variety listed at the 100% organic level. The wines are listed too, but all 39 of them in the made-with-organic-grapes category, which is the US category that allows added sulphites. So in American terms Avondale’s grapes are certified organic and its wines are not, and none of them can carry the USDA organic seal.