Gold, from the Ground Up
Spier celebrated a stellar 2021 awards season. The prestigious Platter’s Wine Guide awarded us as the ‘Editor’s Choice: Winery of the Year 2022’, in recognition of its "rare combination of achievements...excellence at both the rarified and volume ends of the market”. We also received top honours at the Veritas Wine Awards with the ‘Duimpie Bayly Veritas Vertex Award’ for our 2018 Spier Creative Block 5. A Bordeaux-style blend, Creative Block 5 was selected as the overall champion wine from almost 1300 entries. Incredibly, this is the second time that Spier walks away with this trophy! With a legacy rooted in over 300 years of winemaking heritage, it's safe to say that our wines certainly meet the gold standard. Here’s why we attribute our success to our maxim that gold-medal wine begins from the ground up.
Gold Starts with Good Thinking
At Spier, the health of the vineyards and respecting nature is our starting point. By pursuing natural farming and winemaking as far as possible, the focus remains on working with varieties best suited to the terroir. For Spier’s Cellar Master Johan Jordaan, good grapes are made in the vineyard - but great wines are a team effort. Johan recently succeeded his mentor and industry icon, Frans Smit, who has now taken on Spier’s Managing Director role after 25 years of exemplary winemaking and viticultural leadership.
“Spier’s winemaking philosophy starts where all great winemaking should: in the vineyard. We prefer to approach each block individually, placing great effort and knowledge into the details,” shares Johan.
Johan works very closely with our skilled Viticulturist Bennie Liebenberg to express the best from each site. Since joining Spier in July 2019, Bennie has focused on establishing trusted relationships with the growers that supply the grapes for our top-tier wine ranges, including Frans K. Smit, 21 Gables, Creative Block and Seaward.
“I aim to get the very best out of every site that we source grapes from,” he explains. “What we do in the vineyard can significantly impact the wine’s ultimate quality. This includes the kind of rootstock we use, what kind of trellis system there is, the pruning and cropping that gets done, and when we harvest. My job is to ensure we do all these things optimally.”
