Stark-Condé Wines is only a stone’s throw from the town centre of Stellenbosch, but when you arrive there, you feel like you’re in another world. Remote, quiet, calm. In the Jonkershoek Valley. Well, it’s not always so quiet because they have a very popular restaurant where you can taste their wines. It’s a popular venue, which one can understand. They make excellent wines, a very exciting Stellenbosch winery. They are most famous for their cabernet sauvignon, like many wineries in Stellenbosch. But they make a wide range of wines, pinot noir, an exciting white “field blend”, syrah, petit sirah… A little while back, I sat down and talked with the owner, José Condé.
In the afternoon, the traffic can be horrendous in Stellenbosch. It is a town of only around 80,000 inhabitants but it feels much bigger, perhaps due to the university and to the tourists, and it has traffic jams worthy of a big city. However, as soon as you get past the R310, which is the main artery on the south-east side, things change. A couple of kilometres more, and you are in the Jonkershoek Valley. It has a nature reserve and it has Stark Condé Wines. (As well as the Lanzerac Winery which was the first one to produce pinotage wines commercially.)
An article in our series of talks with South African winemakers. Read all here:
- Springfontein Wines, surprising and extraordinary South African
- Hidden high up in the Stellenbosch mountains is a gem, Oldenburg Vineyards
- Kaapzicht, a pinotage pioneer and cabernet champion in Stellenbosch
- Both classic and unusual, Stark-Condé Wines in Stellenbosch, South Africa
- Aslina Wines, Ntsiki Biyela’s new venture, and the future of South African wine
- DP Burger at Glenwood Vineyards in Franschhoek, South Africa
And also:
This is a longer version of an article published on Forbes.com.
The Stark-Condé winery is owned and run by José and Marie Condé. He is American, and she is half Japanese and half South African. José is the son of a Cuban who emigrated to the US. José grew up in a small town in Missouri called Independence. Marie grew up in Japan, the daughter of Hans Schroder, a South African who settled in Japan when he married Midori Maruyama. Hans had gone to Japan to study and met Midori at university. Things went well, and they married. But things were not so well in South Africa. This was still during apartheid, so being a white South African married to a Japanese woman was not acceptable. So Hans and Midori stayed in Japan — and had three daughters.
When apartheid disappeared, they decided it was time to move back to South Africa. They bought a farm with some vines close to Stellenbosch. Sometime later, Marie, one of the three daughters, and her American husband, José, decided to join them in South Africa. And so the adventure of the Stark-Condé winery started.
Today, they make a wide range of wines at Stark-Condé. Cabernet sauvignon is their most important product. They make it in three different versions: Stellenbosch, Three Pines, and Oude Nektar. The Three Pines label is a special thing. When you come to the winery, you can look up towards the mountains – they are surrounded by mountains – and you will see the three pines. They make two versions of this “high altitude single vineyard” wine, one cabernet and one syrah.
They make a white chenin blanc, which, even if it is the most planted South African grape, is unusual here, partially fermented in concrete eggs. And they make this curiosity they call “Field Blend”. But more on that later.
A while back, I had the opportunity to sit down with José and talk about his projects and his wines. (The talk that you can watch below on video was recorded in February 2020.)
It is a special place, the Jonkershoek Valley, but what is it that makes it so special?, I asked José. José explains, “This valley is definitely different than the rest of Stellenbosch. It is probably the most unique terroir within Stellenbosch. The main factor is that it has double the amount of rainfall than the Stellenbosch average, more than any other ward in Stellenbosch. That is because of these high mountains that hold in the rain clouds over the wintertime. It has about twice as much winter rainfall. Our summer rainfall is not that different than the rest of Stellenbosch.”
What about the soil?
“We have decomposed granite soil very typical of Stellenbosch mountain sites, decomposed granite with a fair amount of clay and clay subsoils and high iron content.”
So, it is different from the rest of Stellenbosch. What does that mean for the wines?
“Early in the season, the skins and the seeds and the tannins in the grapes are developing differently. So Jonkershoek is known for having a very distinct tannin quality. Most people refer to it as an elegance in the wines, an elegant tannin that it has.”
Stellenbosch, as a whole, is famous for its top-quality cabernet sauvignon wines. At Stark-Condé, it is, too, the most important variety, accounting for more than half of the production. But they make a wide range of wines, about a dozen, not counting the MAN wines or the Lievland estate. What is, then, the philosophy behind the wines?
José continues, “We’ve been sustainable for more than ten years, and we are in our third year of organic farming (in 2020). Our general philosophy is to keep things as simple as possible. I’m not religious about anything, but we tend to use only natural yeast, and we tend to not add anything to the wines and just try to keep them as simple as possible. We don’t usually do fining and filtration unless it’s absolutely necessary. So I think that’s basically it.”
“We try to express the area that we live in. I think we often describe ourselves as a cabernet producer because it’s about 60% of our production. It’s a big focus of what we do. This area is known as one of the prime spots for cabernets in South Africa. But we do a few other things. We always try to make wines that we like to drink. We have a very popular café here; it’s a casual place, and people do drink a lot of wine. So we want wines that can go nicely with nice, long South African summers.”
Are the wines they make bourn out of a South African tradition? No, says José, “I’m not traditional South African. I’m American. I’ve been here 22 years now. Certainly, I bring different ideas to it. I don’t even know what it means to be “traditionally South African”. At the same time, I want to make wines that are unique to our place. I’m not trying to make California wines or French wines or mimic anything. We’re trying to make the best Jonkershoek Valley wines that we possibly can.”
But back to the particular wine I mentioned in the beginning, the Field Blend. José chose to plant four different white varieties since the soil is very diverse on that particular plot. It is a plot of land that also has a historic significance. It is one of the oldest continuously planted vineyards in Stellenbosch, 350 years old. So, what about the unusual Field Blend?
“It is planted with a mix of white varieties. We make a wine from that vineyard called ‘the Field Blend’. It is a blend of chenin blanc, roussanne, viognier and verdelho. It’s made quite unusually in that it’s mainly co-fermented; we pick the grapes, we pick (the different varieties) very close together, press it, blend it and then ferment it instead of waiting to the end (to blend it).”
The vines planted there now are not 350 years old (although there are some very old vines in South Africa). They were planted some 15 years ago with the idea that viognier and roussanne would give aromatics and body to the wine and chenin blanc and verdelho would give it freshness. What makes this particularly unusual, in addition to the original grape blend, is that they are planted on the same plot and “co-fermented”, i.e. the blend is done before fermentation and not after, which is the usual thing to do.
The “Field Blend” is perhaps the most emblematic wine of Stark-Condé. It embodies the blend of different cultures and different characters into one wine that permeates through the whole story of the winery.
To complicate things even more, José and Marie are involved in three different wine projects; in addition to their own Stark-Condé winery, they make wine together with partners under the brand name M.A.N. and, most recently, an old wine estate that they have purchased and are in the process of reviving, called Lievland.
What about the two other winery projects you are involved with?, I asked José. “I have another winery in partnership with two other winemakers, two brothers. It’s called MAN. The name is taken from our wives’ names: Marie, Anette and Nicky. Our main business (with MAN) is to focus on really good value varietal wines.”
“But that business also owns a wine estate called Lievland Vineyards. Liev, which in Afrikaans means ‘love land’. It was a very well-known South African winery when I first came to South Africa 22 years ago. It was widely considered to be amongst the top five of South African wineries. But it fell under hard times because the owner was not so interested. But that gave us an opportunity to purchase it at a good price. And we’re busy developing that and trying to resurrect it. The venues were in such poor condition, so it’s going to take us some time to get them up to scratch. We’ve made a few estate wines (*), but they’re very limited. But little by little, we’ll do more estate wines.” ((*) – “Estate wine” is a protected designation in South Africa, meaning that the grapes have to come from their own property.)
Today, a few years after this conversation, José and his partners have Lievland up and running properly, and I look forward to discovering their wines in the future. It is at the opposite end of Stellenbosch, north of town. They run the winery independently, and the range is different. Chenin blanc, sauvignon blanc, syrah, cabernet and even pinotage. Pinotage is more and more a grape that many South African wineries are putting forward. Exciting.
The last thing to add is that here at Stark-Condé, there’s the Postcard Café. It’s called Postcard Café for a reason. It has a postcard view. This is an excellent place to taste all their wines and enjoy the fabulous view over the mountains while enjoying some delicious food. If you ask kindly, you might even get to peek into the winery. It’s just around the corner.
It is actually called the “Postcard Café” for two reasons. As José explains, “There were actually two reasons for the name. One is, of course, when you look at the views, it’s really like a (pretty) postcard. It was also the fact that our whole family has come from a lot of different routes. And the idea was that the food that we serve would have little touches of other countries that are part of our roots or that we like to visit. So it’s got a little bit of a Japanese touch. And a little bit of American. For instance, my mother’s special recipe is one of the desserts that we have. And things that we’ve seen around the world in our travels.”
A blend of many things, as almost everything at Stark Condé.
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