BRANDY IN SOUTH AFRICA

Visit the Groot Marico now and to this day you’ll find people still miffed at Paul Kruger. In their view, Kruger stiffed the little guy when he handed a monopoly on liquor production to the owners of Eerste Fabrieke and the Hatherley Distillery.

What does that have to do with now? The Little Guy is really where the essence of every stook-tradition lies, including ours.

Now, that beef with Oom Paul happened back in the 80s, the 1880s. Kruger struck the deal with businessman Alois Hugo Nellmapius, who was later joined by Samuel “Sammy” Marks and Barnett Lewis. Suddenly, country distillers across Kruger’s ZuidAfrikaansche Republiek (the area that’s now Gauteng/Northwest/ Limpopo/Mpumalanga) who had embraced the practice for two centuries, found themselves on the wrong side of the law.

The sting of this injury remains commemorated in parts of the Marico at least, every time a shot is poured. A “kultuurtjie” (a little culture) some call it. The spirit is generally mampoer, known elsewhere in the world as fruit brandy.

This was the stuff that greased social interactions. It was and, in many cases, still is, seen as an essential adjunct to hospitality. The following example, from Herman Charles Bosman (1905-1951), whose stories made the Marico’s distillers famous. The lines appeared in his book, Mafikeng Road: “We arrived at Willem Prinsloo’s house. There were so many ox-wagons drawn up on the veld that the place looked like a laager. Prinsloo met us at the door.

“‘Go right through, kêrels,’ he said, ‘the dancing is in the voorhuis. The peach brandy is in the kitchen.’”

To boot, the drink’s popularity gained status reserved for precious few – that of cure-all. A cultural review on the topic of folk remedies, going back to previous centuries and titled Volksgeneeskuns in Suid-Afrika (2010, Protea), lists just under 500 recipes with brandy as an ingredient.

With the unrelenting incremental tightening of liquor laws over the years – for example, with the first excise duty imposed on brandy in 1878 – it was mere supply-and-demand with a bit of nostalgia mixed in that fuelled bootlegging.

In his 1973 book Brandy in South Africa, the late André Brink notes “there was a whole nest of smugglers in the Vanwyksdorp district, probably because there were no police there at the time. And this is where the bootleg wagons started off across the mountains for Albertinia and

Still Bay. But the most important smuggle routes led to the Transvaal and Namaqualand: on the latter there was even an outspan near Vredendal which was given the name Brandewynskop (Brandy Hill) because the wagons regularly halted there for a last drink or two before they started off on the dry road into Namaqualand.”

By this time, brandy was already categorised by law as that produced from grapes only, requiring defined techniques, equipment and maturation.

But even though brandy making has evolved dramatically, the sense of history still rings loudest from the small distillery. It’s like the tinkerers workbench versus factory process. This was where daily struggles could be retired briefly, for a moment of companionship over a glass.

Paarl’s Backsberg estate is as good an example as any to conjure up the story of brandy’s Little Guys. A few years after Sammy Marks arrived in SA, so did a fellow Lithuanian Jew – one Charles Louis Back. He

was penniless, recalls great grandson Michael. “Graduating from working as a dockhand on the reclamation programme around what today is the Waterfront, he started as a bicycle delivery ‘boy’, and finally bought a butcher shop at Paarl train station. The story goes that one morning someone arrived at the shop and asked if he would be interested in buying a farm. Mr. C.L. Back thought this an excellent idea and sold the butchers shop to purchase what is today known as Backsberg Estate Cellars.”

Important to this story was the farm’s brandy-making and Alembic still – a bulbous, tentacled object resembling an undersea creature. Backsberg’s first brandy release after the easing of liquor legislation, won Best Brandy in the World at the 1995 International Wine and Spirit Competition (IWSC) in London.

It was a victory for South African brandy, but quietly, a small, rare victory for the Little Guy too.

Boplaas is another whose story dates to 1880, when the first brandy was made for export to London. It had to be borne by wagon from the farm in Calitzdorp, across treacherous mountain landscapes and wild territory to Cape Town harbour. It stopped for a while under government legislation, but when laws relaxed in the late 1980s, Boplaas was among the first to get its license. The result was South Africa’s first Estate Pot Still 5 Year Old Brandy, released in the auspicious year of 1994.

Mons Ruber near Oudtshoorn came to the current family in 1929. Farmer-distiller and amateur historian, Radie Meyer notes that witblits (unaged brandy) became a more than useful income earner for farmers “after the collapse of the feather industry in 1913”.

And so many other contemporary brandymakers have arisen.

There’s Grundheim (Oudtshoorn), a farm established in 1858 with a renowned history of distillation; Bezalel (Upington), which launched brandy production under its new commercial licence in 1997 followed a year later by Upland (Wellington), home of Dr Edmund Oettlé and his wife, Elsie. German immigrant Rolf Schumacher brought together distilling tradition of his mother country with that of Wellington soon after acquiring Oude Wellington in 1995.

The groundswell continued with Tokara firing up distilling in the early 2000s on a Pruhlo Alambic potstill; followed by Kingna near Montagu that put its first spirit in casks in 2007 and Die Mas (Kakamas) that bottled its first brandy in 2014. Many new labels have appeared too and while they may not have been made by the brand-owners, they capture the magic of the Little Guy’s craft.

Today, little remains of Pretoria’s historic Eerste Fabrieke project. A few buildings stand derelict on open land criss-crossed by pathways between neighbourhoods of the former Group Areas township of Mamelodi. There’s a train station and a few roads named after the former grand scheme too.

Brandy keeps firing though, its very significance carried forward by those talented tinkerers at distilleries, small and big. Truly hand crafted, these spirits reflect the care and attention to detail of genuine brandy enthusiasts.

- The need-to-knows about brandy and cognac. All cognac is brandy, but not all brandy is cognac. Cognac is a type of brandy made from distilled white wine made in one very specific region of France. Brandy, on the other hand, is “burnt wine,” or in simpler terms, a spirit distilled from fruit-based wine. Brandy can be made anywhere in the world and can be distilled from the wine of other fruits like pears and apples. The word “brandy” comes from the Dutch word “brandwijn” which means burnt wine, and over time was shortened to just brandy.

VS (Very Special): A cognac that’s aged for at least two years. VSOP (Very Superior Old Pale): A cognac that’s aged for at least four years. XO (Extra Old): A cognac that has aged ten years or more. Hors d’âge (Beyond Age): If you find a brandy with this on the label, that means it’s old - so old, in fact, that no one’s sure how old it is. Don’t ask if you should mix it with coke!

- Do a little research and you’ll find that brandies, and even cognacs, all offer varying flavour profiles that can make your tasting party super interesting and fun. Try to keep your selection to five to avoid palate fatigue. Start with your youngest and get into your strongest or smokiest flavours towards the end of the tasting.

- Invest in a couple of crystal brandy snifters. They’re short and are perfect for cradling in hand to help warm the drink. Their large bowls allow the drink to be swirled and the shorter mouth traps the aromas allowing the drinker to enjoy a more prominent scent as they sip.

- Start with a tiny wetting of the lips. Too much on that first sip can be overpowering and put you off ever trying again. After your taste buds have acclimatised, you can take bigger sips to fully appreciate the taste.

- If your guests are going to sample a number of brandies, start first with the youngest aged and move up through the older brandies. Always leave some of each to go back to. It is amazing how different your first taste can taste after your last one, once your nose and palate have been through them all and warmed up to tasting neat brandies.

- Because of the rich flavours in brandy, you can complement venison meat with a well-aged brandy. It will cut through the heaviness of the meat, but then combine with the long smooth finish to create an earthy combination.

- When choosing fish to go with brandy, try something like a snoek, sardines or mackerel. All of them have enough oil content to hold their own with one of South Africa’s favourite spirits.

- A smooth brandy is fantastic when paired with a piece of strong cheese as the cheese enhances the floral flavours of the brandy.