Kershaw Wines

Few winemakers bring as much rigour to the vineyard as Richard Kershaw MW. Born in Sheffield, he cooked professionally before wine took over, arriving in South Africa in 1999 and rising to group winemaker at Mulderbosch and Kanu. He passed the Master of Wine examination in 2011 and in January 2012 founded Kershaw Wines, joining the small handful of Masters of Wine anywhere in the world who make their own wine. His choice of home was deliberate. Elgin, which he describes as the coolest wine district in South Africa, averages around 1,500 degree days against roughly 1,950 in Stellenbosch. It is a saucer-shaped plateau ringed by mountains, with his vineyards mostly between 300 and 420 metres and never more than about 11 kilometres from the sea. Summer cloud carried in on the south-easterly wind and cool nights slow the ripening and hold natural acidity, while Table Mountain sandstone around the rim of the valley gives way to Bokkeveld shale and gravels towards its centre, a patchwork of soils that sits at the heart of everything Kershaw makes.

What sets the wines apart is clonal selection. Rather than treating a grape as a single entity, Kershaw works with specific clones on specific soils, picking each parcel by hand and vinifying every combination of clone and soil separately. Eleven Chardonnay blocks can become more than twenty individual batches before a blend is assembled, each matched to French oak from a small group of artisan coopers. Clonal Selection Chardonnay is built on low-yielding Dijon clones 76, 95, 96 and 548, giving a restrained, mineral style with white fruit, oatmeal and finely judged oak that has made it one of the Cape's benchmark Chardonnays. Clonal Selection Pinot Noir draws on Burgundian clones including 115, 667 and 777, mostly from the western side of the valley, for perfume, red fruit and fine-grained tannins. Clonal Selection Syrah, from clones SH9c and SH22 across five Elgin parcels, is a subtle, Northern Rhône-inspired style of black fruit, iodine and ground white pepper. The idea reaches its purest form in the Deconstructed range, where a single clone from a single site and soil is bottled on its own.

Kershaw's curiosity also takes him beyond Elgin. The GPS Series, short for Grape Positioning System, captures exceptional parcels he has found elsewhere on the Cape South Coast, each vinified in small, separate batches. Lower Duivenhoks River Chardonnay comes from a single block of Dijon clone CY95, found in 2016, growing on limestone, a rarity in the Western Cape, close to the river that meets the Indian Ocean between Cape Agulhas and Mossel Bay. It pairs a broad, textured mid-palate with chalky, incisive acidity. The Hemel-en-Aarde Pinot Noir brings together two parcels of clones 777 and 115 on Bokkeveld shale, discovered in 2018 in a sheltered lee of the valley above Hermanus, for the most delicate and floral of Kershaw's Pinots. Klein River Syrah is made from the Rhône clone SH1 on three hectares of shale-derived Glenrosa soils beneath the Klein River mountains, in one of the country's smallest wine wards. Sea breezes from Walker Bay funnel in through the Akkedis Valley, and the vineyard's high levels of rotundone deliver piercing black pepper over dark fruit. Together, the collection is a study in precision: the right clone, on the right soil, in the right place.