High above the Franschhoek valley, on land first planted by Huguenots in 1688, Chamonix holds some of the highest vineyards in the Cape and the first underground cellar in South Africa. For a quarter of a century it has not irrigated at all.
In 2018 the winemaker described an estate farming against the drought by refusing the obvious tool. No irrigation, organic since 2017, mealybug controlled by ladybirds and two species of wasp, mildew by copper and sulphur. Half the crop dropped to the ground so each vine carries only its best two bunches. And the adaptation that matters most for a warming world: they stopped picking by sugar and started reading phenolic ripeness directly, by walking the rows and tasting the seed and the skin. What the textbook said no longer applied.
Irrigating a vine is like giving a child McDonald's. It just sits and does nothing. Without water, the roots keep growing, looking, reaching minerals they would never have touched.
The estate's German-born owner, Chris Hellinger, died at the end of 2020. In late 2021 Chamonix was sold to a Norwegian property company, and the winemaker left. In January 2025, wildfire swept Franschhoek and destroyed the estate's guest lodge. Drought, then loss, then sale, then fire. We are going back to a place that has lived the last eight years of climate and change in compressed form.