Longridge Wine Estate

The Free Bacchus Story

When Jasper Raats took a permanent job at Longridge in 2011, one condition was that he be allowed to take its Pinotage in a more elegant direction. The estate’s Dutch importer, until then an important customer, threatened to stop buying unless the old, bolder style came back. What followed, Raats told Winemag in 2019, was a nervous couple of months, until a few good reviews came in and the new style became a success.

Longridge farms the slopes of the Helderberg, a mountain in Stellenbosch, a few kilometres from False Bay. Stellenbosch is judged mostly on Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux blends, and the Helderberg, the estate says, is the coolest of its wards, the named areas printed on labels, with breezes off the bay by day and cool air sliding down the mountain at night. The vines grow in decomposed granite over clay, which Raats credits for the fine tannins of the reds. The top wine here is a Merlot. Merlot is the grape of Pomerol, on the right bank of Bordeaux, and it gives a round, supple red with plum fruit and soft tannins. Pinotage is South Africa’s own grape, a cross of Pinot Noir and Cinsault, and at the top end the style that has sold best is bigger, darker and thicker. Longridge goes the other way; the estate says it makes its Pinotage for the fruit and character of the Pinot Noir side. Its estate whites are Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc.

Raats came to Longridge through his consulting business. From 2003 he was viticulturist and winemaker at Clos Henri in Marlborough, New Zealand, for the Bourgeois family of Sancerre. The farm had been bought in 2006 by the Dutch Van der Laan family, wine.co.za reported in 2011, the year they brought him in. He finished the 2010 reds and 2011 whites, and 2012 was the first vintage entirely his. The conversion to organic farming began in 2011, and the oldest vintage on the organic certificate today is a 2015 Chenin Blanc. Ducks work the rows for insects, Nguni cattle supply manure, and planting and picking follow the moon. The estate farms biodynamically but is not certified biodynamic.

Misterie, the Merlot, is the estate’s most expensive bottle. It spends two years in barrel, mostly new French oak, and at least two more in bottle before it is sold. It was launched with the 2015 vintage at R2,000 a bottle, a price Christian Eedes of Winemag expected people to argue about, and when the 2018 fell short of what the estate wanted, it was not released. The Chardonnay, Clos du Ciel, comes from a small, densely planted vineyard that John Platter put in on the Helderberg. John and Erica Platter established the guide that carries their name, and the Clos du Ciel 2023 has five stars in Platter’s 2026 guide. Eedes gave 96 points to the Clos du Ciel 2018.

In 2024 Longridge was one of the eleven estates that founded Organic Wines South Africa, but not everything it sells is organic. Ecocert’s EU certificate for the winery names the Longridge Estate still wines, from the R265 Chenin Blanc up to the Ultra-Premium Misterie and Clos du Ciel, at the vintages on sale, and part of Jasper Raats Wines, a single-vineyard label the estate also sells. The Konkelberg wines and the Jasper Raats Die Plek, Silk Weaver, Skebenga and Basket & Barrel are not on it, some other bottles cannot be matched to the vintage on sale, and non-organic wine is made alongside the organic. The vineyards are certified separately, under DEBAL Wine BV, a company incorporated in the Netherlands, whose US organic certificate was surrendered in March 2025. With no US certificate left, no Longridge bottle can be sold as organic in the United States.