The daily partaking of a bottle of wine is one of life’s reliable joys: never mundane, consistent in the primal enjoyment thereof, yet startling in the diverse scope of sensorial experiences offered due to the endless array of varieties, styles and origins finding their way into your glass.
But when this experience is elevated from a passing daily pleasure to finding the magnificent and stupendous, joy and wonder being elevated to the realms of the surreal, this then when one feels this all-encompassing obsession with wine to be vindicated. A great wine makes it all make sense.
It has taken me three days and two bottles of Meerlust Estate's Cabernet Sauvignon 2021 to reach the above conclusion, complemented by brief notes to fellow wine-loving mates that, among the steady flow of fine wines from the Cape’s current releases, this is one to take note of. For it is, as they say in the classics, a keeper.
The release of this specific wine, and the fact that it is a great wine, is suitably apt here in the year of 2025. For it was 50 years back that the first Meerlust wine – a Cabernet Sauvignon – was made for bottling under the estate’s label. Before then, from the farm’s establishing in 1693, right through the reign of the Myburgh family from 1756 until seventh generation Nico Myburgh took charge, Meerlust had sold its grapes and bulk wines to willing takers.
Nico Myburgh – father of current Meerlust proprietor Hannes – changed the family farm’s trajectory. He began planting the red varieties Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot – Chenin Blanc, Cinsault and Sémillon had for decades been the major cultivars farmed – which led to the first Meerlust estate wine being bottled from the 1975 vintage. The next step was the release of this maiden Meerlust Cabernet Sauvignon in 1978, instantaneously forging the brand’s perennial status as an integral part of South Africa’s premium wine offering.
Plainly put, the estate’s Cabernet Sauvignon 2021 is one hell of a wine with which to celebrate half a century of winemaking under the Meerlust label. And its sublime quality and sheer beauty will be of special satisfaction to the proponents underscoring Cabernet Sauvignon grown in the Stellenbosch appellation as the region’s foremost and most distinctive wine grape variety.
But further than this: when scrutinising a wine such as Meerlust Cabernet Sauvignon 2021, and scraping the memory bank for recollections of Cabernet Sauvignons from other Stellenbosch producers such as Kanonkop, Rustenberg, Alto, Le Riche, Ernie Els – to name but only a smattering – it has to be said that no other red grape cultivar grown in South Africa is capable of presenting an array of wines showing the degree of class and regal nobility that Cabernet Sauvignon does.
This 2021 vintage from Meerlust was made from grapes grown on both sides of the Eerste River cutting through the property. The one section of Cabernet Sauvignon vines is set on a slope on the river’s left bank, the plants rooted in decomposed granite soils and almost full-on north-facing, squinting into the midday and afternoon sun. On the opposite bank there’s more Cabernet Sauvignon, growing here on the sandy alluvial soils, a flatland that has for centuries been home to Meerlust vines, the roots finding generous, kind purchase in the loose soils that are for a large part of the year moist due their close proximity of the Eerste River.
As is noticeable as more wines come to market, 2021 was a great year for Stellenbosch reds. A late winter brought lashing cold fronts, with a cool growing season resulting in extended ripening periods delivering concentrated grapes of visceral territorial and varietal expression.
Back at Meerlust, the two different parcels of Cabernet Sauvignon got themselves vinified separately, the young wines underwent malolactic fermentation and were kept apart in barrel for six months before being assessed and blended to agreeable portions, then sent back to mature in oak barrels for another 12 months. Half the barrels were new.
Obviously, the prospect of opening and experiencing a new Cabernet Sauvignon vintage from a renowned a marque as Meerlust comes with a set of predetermined expectations of the positive side. But even the loftiest expectations were overridden here, buried, by the sheer splendour and magnificence of this wine which, in April, is already my wine of 2025 thus far.
It is about completeness, and about structure; balance and harmony; about a mannered, agreeable charm that holds one with both the gentle finger-clasp of flirtation and the needy grip of seduction.
The wine has an evocative maritime, oyster-shell aroma, notes often found in well-schooled Cabernet Sauvignon, but mostly on wines of greater maturity. The saline scent, however, quickly gives way to broody, shadowy notes of autumnal fruit and brittle sun-dried cedar.
Upon the first taste the immediate presence and the wine’s commanding structure leads to a comparison of this Meerlust Cabernet Sauvignon 2021 with some forms of non-consumable beauty. Evocative statuesque images that came to mind are a Michelangelo statue sculpted from Carrara marble; a leopard on its haunches, the golden spotted hide glowing in the late-afternoon sun as its coiled muscles await signals from the mind to unleash the body onto hapless prey; tennis goddess Aryna Sabalenka pummelling a cross-court forehand past a frozen opponent.
In this wine, the muscled tannins have been sculpted into forms of grace and beauty that bear the whole body from the beginning of the sip to the final sappy throes of its finish. The experience is all encompassing, riveting dense beams of classic wine-flavoured elegance covered with plush, broad layers of dark-fruited tapestries where plum, mulberry and blackcurrant are – at this stage of its development – discernible.
But the lasting impression of Meerlust Cabernet Sauvignon 2021 is the way the wine appears polished to a state of clarity and purity, placing it a long way down on the road to the unachievable destination of perfection. No wine will ever get there, but the distance Meerlust has reached is one only attainable by a remarkable few.
This article was originally published on Wine Goggle, Emile Joubert's blog.
