French chateau by design, Roman villa in style, Cape country in character - Waterford Estate offers a world-class experience where service standards and wine quality combine to rare effect.
A Cape Mediterranean Gem
Waterford is a gem. Tucked away in the narrow Blaauwklippen Valley where two mountain ranges meet, its beauty is a revelation.
Driving along the wide avenue leading to the winery, you pass manicured lawns, natural lakes dotted with geese and cormorants, and a row of camphor trees along a ridge of boulders. You finally come to two stone pillars topped by weathered urns and ahead is the winery, standing in a citrus orchard.
Designed by co-owner and vintner Kevin Arnold and architect Alex Walker, its biscuit-colored walls, red roof, and terraces and archways of raw rock are complemented by doors, window frames and shutters in cool green. In late spring, the air is filled with the fragrance of citrus blossom and lavender.
For all its grandeur, Waterford is a home-grown family winery built on a budget. It was designed by co-owner and vintner Kevin Arnold himself, with interiors by wife Heather, with the aim of allowing visitors to share in the rarified world of winemaking.
Essentially a steel structure with cladding, it is built around a courtyard shaded by plane trees, with Waterford’s trademark fountain splashing in the centre.
Tasting takes place on the broad terrace surrounding the courtyard, or at Provencal-style cloth-covered tables under the plane trees, where a young team of highly-trained assistants serves your wines from a menu. ‘We discourage counter tasting’, says Arnold. ‘We want you to sit down, relax and be spoilt.’
A Cellar for the Senses
The quad is also where experienced chef Craig Cormack and newcomer Beau du Toit have opened SALT at Waterford, offering a small, seasonal, lunchtime menu, each dish highlighting a different type of specialty salt or method of salt curing.
Salted delicacies also feature in wine pairing options and lawn picnics. This Taste Journey has replaced Waterford’s earlier collaboration with a chocolatier in matching wines to artisanal chocolates, to equally innovative effect.
Each wing of the quad houses a section of the winery. Lounge on a sofa with your glass of wine and watch the harvest come into the fermentation cellar across the courtyard.
Wander over to another wing to watch grapes being hand-sorted, peek into the dimly lit barrel room with its softly hissing humidifiers or witness the bottling and labeling process through large windows, shutters flung open.
You may bump into Arnold, whose office also opens onto the verandah; you’ll know he’s around if you see two large Rhodesian ridgebacks lying on one of the kelims or at the open hearth of the tasting room.
The Arnolds live next door and treat the winery as an extension of their home; Heather is constantly adding to the eclectic collection of Cape country, French Provençal and Bali furnishings, spiced with the occasional ethnic African piece.
Asked by potential investor Gauteng-based IT entrepreneur Jeremy Ord to find a property suitable for wine-growing, Kevin and Heather came across Waterford in 1998.
It was a subdivision, mostly under fruit trees, in a good viticultural area typified by deep clay soils. But its unusual position, encompassing two ridges of pure rock and pebble, promised something unique that appealed to Arnold.
Having developed flagship red blends at Delheim and Rust-en-Vrede - and acquired a reputation as a top-class winemaker in doing so - he was aiming for a Cape ‘Super Red’ dictated by its provenance.
Wine and Vineyard Exploration
A decade later he felt he’d come close enough and in 2008 introduced The Jem. Named after co-owner Jeremy Ord, it’s an unusual blend of eight varieties: Bordeaux classics Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Merlot, and ‘Mediterranean’ varieties Shiraz, Mourvèdre, Sanviovese and Barbera.
You can taste it at a special Vintage Reserve Tasting, where you work through the evolution of this wine through six or more different vintages and varietal permutations, guided by Arnold or winemaker Mark le Roux. Some of these classic varieties are also bottled as single-varietal wines.
Besides being treated to ‘library’ wines (experimental bottlings that often earned selection for the prestigious Cape Winemakers Guild auction), you’ll track the development of The Jem’s vineyards, some 60 hectares that include Petit Verdot, Grenache and Tempranillo.
You’ll also be able to explore the vineyards on foot on The Porcupine Trail, or on wheels on the guided Wine Drive Safari.
While the slopes beneath the imposing Stellenbosch and Helderberg mountains supply Waterford’s largely red portfolio, the Chenin Blanc and Chardonnay from home vineyards are equally acclaimed, supplemented by bought-in fruit for the farm’s popular Pecan Stream and Pebble Hill ranges of quaffers.
The southern part of the Stellenbosch winelands is dominated by the Stellenbosch and Helderberg mountains and, further south, by the magnif...