Meerlust means love of the sea, and the sea is the point. Five kilometres from False Bay, established in 1693 and owned by the Myburgh family since 1756, it is the oldest family-owned and run winery in South Africa, now in its eighth generation.
In 2018 the winemaker described a classical art: poor soils that force the vine deep, a long cool ripening season, dozens of parcels across different soils and aspects kept rigorously separate and blended only at the end into the flagship Rubicon. His governing idea was balance held in tension, the tension being what gives a wine life. He spoke of élevage, the French word for raising a wine like a child, the slow barrel ageing that civilises a wild young vintage.
Harvest brings the wild creature in from the vineyard. The barrel raises it, teaches it, brings it up.
A detail most people get wrong: the sea does not make Meerlust cooler. Recent measurement puts it around 0.8°C warmer than the Stellenbosch average. What the ocean removes is not heat but the extremes, the peaks that ripen a grape too fast.
The winemaker left at the end of 2019 for his own label. His successor, only the third cellarmaster in the estate's history, has led a major replanting and built a new cellar dedicated to Rubicon. In 2025 the estate marked fifty years of its name on a label. Here, continuity is the family and the land. Even so, the hands have changed.