🍷 THE COMPLETE RELIABLE ETYMOLOGICAL GUIDE TO SOUTH AFRICAN WINE NAMES
Where the names came from, what they actually mean, and the surprising number of times the answer involves a French person being difficult
A NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN
The following etymologies are presented in two categories: what the name actually means, delivered with the same confidence as a man who has read half a Wikipedia article and what the name sounds like it should mean, which is frequently more interesting and occasionally more accurate than the truth.
All wine names, it turns out, come from somewhere. Almost none of them come from where you’d expect. Several of them come from a village you cannot find on a modern map. At least two of them come from an argument.
This is wine. Of course they come from an argument.
CABERNET SAUVIGNON
The One Everyone Orders When They Don’t Know What To Order
The name comes from France, obviously — nearly everything in wine comes from France, because France had a head start and has been dining out on this advantage ever since. Cabernet is believed to derive from the Latin carbonet, meaning “little carbon” or relating to the dark, coal-like colour of the grape berry. Sauvignon comes from sauvage, meaning “wild,” referring to the grape’s tendency to grow vigorously and untidily without human intervention, like a teenager who has been given too much independence too soon.
So you are, every time you order a Cabernet Sauvignon ordering a Wild Little Dark Thing, which is either the most accurate description of the wine or the least useful piece of information you’ve ever been given, depending on how the evening is going.
The Cabinet Theory — that Cabernet is named for being stored in a cabinet — is, regrettably, entirely fictional, the product of a brain that heard Cab-inet and made a reasonable but incorrect inference. This brain was not wrong to try. This brain was working hard. The brain was simply betrayed by French etymology, which is not the first time this has happened and will not be the last.
What IS true is that Cabernet Sauvignon on the Stellenbosch hillsides produces wines of such extraordinary structural power that “wild little dark thing” begins to feel completely adequate as a descriptor. You open a Reserve Cab from the Helderberg at year eight and it walks into your mouth like it owns the place. Which, after eight years in a cellar, it does.
SAUVIGNON BLANC
The One That Smells Like a Lawn in a Good Way
Same sauvignon — same wild, untamed, vigorous plant energy. Blanc is simply French for white, because the French, having invented most of the wine vocabulary, occasionally ran out of creative energy and just said what colour the thing was.
So Sauvignon Blanc is Wild White, which sounds like a racehorse or a Marvel character but is actually a green-skinned grape that produces wine so aggressively aromatic that it has been described, variously, as smelling of freshly cut grass, gooseberries, asparagus, cat’s pee — yes, this is in the official literature, yes, winemakers put this on labels as a compliment — and in the Stellenbosch context, that specific fynbos quality that smells like the Western Cape has been briefly, gently set on fire.
The cat’s pee thing deserves its own moment. The compound responsible — 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one, which is the kind of name that makes you grateful for the word “Sauvignon” — is a sulphur compound also present in, yes, cat urine. That same compound, in very small quantities, in the right wine, produces what critics describe as “lifted, vivacious and complex.” In larger quantities, it produces something you’d rather the cat hadn’t done on the carpet.
The difference is concentration and context. This is true of most things.
CHENIN BLANC
South Africa’s Wine, Whether South Africa Knows It Or Not
Chenin Blanc comes from the Anjou region of the Loire Valley in France, specifically from the area around Mont Chenin — a small hill, a minor eminence, a geographical feature so unremarkable that it gave its name to one of the most versatile and extraordinary grape varieties in the world and then got on with being a small hill.
Chenin from the hill. Blanc because white. That’s it. White Hill Thing. The grape is named after topography of minimal drama, which is ironic because Chenin Blanc is the most dramatically versatile variety in existence — it makes bone-dry still wines, off-dry food wines, sparkling wines, dessert wines and in South Africa, where old vine Chenin Blanc bush vines have been growing since the seventeenth century on decomposed granite, it makes wines of such mineral, complex, age-worthy depth that it has been called the Cape’s greatest treasure by virtually every wine writer who has visited and several who haven’t.
South Africa has more old vine Chenin Blanc than anywhere else on earth. This is partly historical accident — it was planted extensively in the mid-twentieth century as a blending and distillation grape, which is like discovering your garden shed contains a Rembrandt and you’ve been using it as a doorstop — and partly a result of the natural wine movement rediscovering it in the 2000s and pointing at it urgently while the rest of the wine world nodded slowly and said, well, obviously.
The hill it’s named after doesn’t know any of this.
CHARDONNAY
The One That Ate an Oak Tree and Has No Regrets
Chardonnay is named after the village of Chardonnay in Burgundy, which is itself named from a Gaulish word possibly meaning “place of thistles” or from the Latin Cardonnacum, which also means something in the thistle family, because apparently the most commercially successful white wine grape in the world is named after a prickly weed growing in a French field two thousand years ago.
The thistle has done extremely well for itself.
What the thistle became, through the miracle of viticulture, French oak barrels and the intervention of the global wine market, is a grape variety capable of producing everything from searingly lean, mineral Chablis to the butter-and-toast, oak-saturated, malolactic-fermented Chardonnay of a certain era that divided the wine world into those who adored it and those who started the ABC movement — Anything But Chardonnay — which is the only wine-related acronym that expresses genuine political sentiment.
The Cape Winelands, particularly Elgin and the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, produces Chardonnay of extraordinary elegance — cool, precise, with that struck-flint quality that makes serious wine drinkers go quiet mid-sentence. The butter-and-oak era has largely passed. The Chardonnay has matured. The thistle became a thoroughbred. The ABC people are gradually, reluctantly, coming back.
The village of Chardonnay in Burgundy has a population of approximately 200 people and a sign at the entrance that may be the most commercially valuable piece of metal in French agriculture.
MERLOT
The Approachable One, Which Means Different Things To Different People
Merle is French for blackbird. Merlot is therefore the Little Blackbird, named for the bird’s appetite for the dark, ripe Merlot berry at harvest time, when the vineyards of Bordeaux apparently resembled a buffet for small corvids with refined taste.
The blackbird, in choosing Merlot over other available grapes, demonstrated aesthetic judgment that has been validated by approximately forty percent of all wine consumers since, who choose Merlot for its approachability, its soft tannins, its plummy generosity and — though nobody says this — its fundamental decency. Merlot is a decent grape. It doesn’t challenge you. It arrives in the glass warm and round and ready to get along with whatever you’re eating. It does not have opinions about your palate calibration.
The Cape Winelands Merlot has had an identity crisis for approximately twenty years, stemming partly from the film Sideways (2004), in which a character’s passionate rejection of Merlot — “I am NOT drinking any Merlot!” — caused an actual measurable decline in global Merlot sales while simultaneously causing a spike in Pinot Noir sales, which is the most commercially significant piece of film dialogue in wine history and which the Merlot grape had absolutely no say in and continues to have done nothing to deserve.
Cape Merlot is experiencing a quiet renaissance. The blackbird is back at the vineyard. Order it without apology.
PINOTAGE
The One That Was Made In South Africa and South Africa Keeps Having Feelings About
Pinotage is not named after a place or a hill or a French person’s surname. Pinotage is named after its parents.
In 1925, a professor at Stellenbosch University named Abraham Izak Perold crossed Pinot Noir — the temperamental, expensive, thin-skinned aristocrat of the Burgundy cellars — with Cinsault, which was at the time called Hermitage in South Africa, because the South Africans had given it a different name, because this is the kind of thing that happens in wine.
Pinot + Hermitage = Pinotage.
The cross nearly died. Perold planted the seedlings in his university garden, was then transferred to a different position, forgot about them entirely and when the garden was being cleared to build a new house the seedlings were discovered by chance and rescued. The entire future of South Africa’s only indigenous grape variety rested, for a period, on a gardener not being too thorough.
Pinotage was officially released in 1961, was embraced, then criticised for producing what detractors called “rusty nails and acetone” when badly made, then rehabilitated by producers who worked out how to make it properly, then made into wine that wins international competitions, then made into wine that also appears on the bottom shelf at R75 and the whole of this complicated emotional history is visible in the face of any South African wine person asked about Pinotage at a dinner party.
They will have a position. The position will be strong. There will be history behind the position.
It is South Africa’s grape. It was nearly cleared by a gardener. It survived. It is not entirely sure how to feel about this. Neither are we.
SHIRAZ / SYRAH
Same Wine, Different Identity Crisis
The grape is the same. The name depends on where the wine was made and, increasingly, what the winemaker is trying to communicate about themselves.
Syrah is the French name, used in the RhĂ´ne Valley and adopted by producers who want to suggest a certain elegance, restraint and old-world sensibility. When you see Syrah on a Cape Winelands label, you are receiving information: this producer has been to France, has opinions about the RhĂ´ne and would like you to approach the glass with a certain seriousness.
Shiraz is the Australian-influenced name and it signals something different: riper, more generous, more exuberant fruit. Full body. Possibly some chocolate. Definitely some black pepper. When you see Shiraz on a label, the wine is probably ready to meet you halfway.
The etymology is contested. One theory says Syrah is named after the Persian city of Shiraz — a city with a long wine-producing history that was somewhat interrupted by Islamic prohibition, which must have been an uncomfortable few centuries for a city that had built part of its identity around wine production. Another theory, preferred by French historians who find the Persian connection geographically implausible, says it comes from the town of Syracuse or from a Roman Emperor or from a Celtic word or from several other sources that have the benefit of being European and therefore more comfortable for French wine historiography.
The Iranians maintain the Shiraz connection. The French maintain the French connection. The wine sits in the glass, tasting of dark plums and white pepper and whatever the Paardeberg or the Helderberg has put into it and has no strong feelings about the argument.
It is used to this.
PINOT NOIR
The Difficult One, Beloved For Being Difficult
Pinot comes from the French for pine cone — the grape clusters are small and tight and pine-cone shaped, bundled close together in a way that makes them susceptible to rot in wet conditions and difficult to ripen in cold ones and generally challenging to grow under any conditions, which is a personality trait the grape has maintained with remarkable consistency across every wine region it has ever been planted in.
Noir means black. Dark. The grape is dark-skinned. The wine is pale — translucent, almost see-through at the edges, the kind of pale that makes you think there’s been a mistake until you taste it, at which point the mistake turns out to be everything you assumed about the relationship between colour and flavour in wine.
So: Dark Pine Cone, which is not the name you’d choose for a grape that produces the most haunting, complex, expensive, emotionally affecting red wines in the world, but here we are.
The Cape’s cool-climate regions — Elgin, Hemel-en-Aarde, Walker Bay — have become world-class Pinot Noir (pronounced P Nomore) producers, which is still surprising to people who knew South African wine twenty years ago and is entirely unsurprising to anyone who has drunk a glass of Bouchard Finlayson or Hamilton Russell on a cold evening and experienced what the difficult, complicated, pine-cone-shaped Dark Thing can do when it finds the right piece of cold granite to grow on.
Pinot Noir is the grape that will humble you. Every time you think you understand it, it does something different. Every winemaker who grows it describes it as a relationship — loving, maddening, unpredictable, entirely worth it.
This is either a description of a grape variety or a description of approximately half of all significant human relationships.
Both, probably.
CABERNET FRANC
The Parent That Everyone Forgot About Until Recently
Cabernet Franc is, genetically, one of the parents of Cabernet Sauvignon — the wild, sauvage side of the family. DNA analysis confirmed this in 1997, at which point Cabernet Franc, which had been quietly producing excellent wine in the Loire Valley and as a blending component in Bordeaux for several centuries, was finally acknowledged as the progenitor of the world’s most commercially successful red grape.
It did not get a party. Wine doesn’t work that way.
Franc in this context means “free” or “pure” — possibly referring to the grape’s vigour, its frankness of character or possibly just distinguishing it from other Cabernets in the way that “free-range” distinguishes chickens that have been given more room. The Cabernet part comes from the same disputed Latin roots as Cabernet Sauvignon — the dark berry, the wild grower.
So: Free Wild Dark Thing, which is the elder sibling of Wild Little Dark Thing and which in the Cape Winelands context produces wines of aromatic, herbaceous, red-fruited distinction that have been described with the word “violet” more frequently than any other grape variety and which are experiencing what the wine press calls a “moment” and what producers who have been making it for years call “about time.”
Cabernet Franc is the wine the wine people are drinking right now. By the time this reaches you, there will be a waiting list.
There is always a waiting list for the right thing, once people discover it.
GRENACHE / GARNACHA
The Mediterranean One That Found Its People In The Swartland
The etymology of Grenache is, remarkably, genuinely contested in a way that produces actual scholarly disagreement rather than the polite circumspection that usually surrounds wine etymology debates.
The most widely accepted theory connects Grenache to the Italian city of Genoa — Gernache in old French — through which the grape was traded in the medieval period, making Grenache, potentially, a wine named after a shipping port, which is the most prosaic possible origin for a grape that makes some of the most voluptuous, sun-drenched, hedonistically pleasurable wines on earth.
Garnacha is the Spanish name — same grape, different country, different character, the same fundamental quality of ripeness and warmth that makes it the dominant variety in southern Rhône blends and the thing that makes Swartland dry-farmed old vine examples taste like concentrated sunshine filtered through sixty years of schist.
The Cape Swartland, with its ancient unirrigated bush vines, hot dry summers and the particular quality of light that falls on the Paardeberg, produces Grenache of extraordinary depth — wines that the natural wine movement has embraced with the enthusiasm of people who have found something that tastes exactly like what they’ve been talking about for years.
The shipping port of Genoa would be very surprised by all of this.
VIOGNIER
The Aromatic One That Arrived Like Perfume At A Braai
The etymology of Viognier is one of wine’s genuine mysteries, which is either charming or suspicious depending on how much you trust things that cannot be traced. Theories include: a derivation from the Roman road Via Gehennae (road to hell, which is either a warning or a recommendation), a connection to the town of Vienne in the northern RhĂ´ne or — the theory currently preferred by people who find the Road to Hell narrative irresistible — exactly that.
The Road to Hell. Viognier, etymologically, might mean the thing from the road to hell, which is either the most dramatic grape name in existence or a medieval Roman’s honest assessment of the journey required to reach the vineyards.
What Viognier produces, whatever the road required, is the most perfumed white wine in existence — apricot, peach blossom, honeysuckle, jasmine and a quality that perfumers call floral and wine writers call heady and ordinary people call “this smells incredible, what is this?” The wine is rich and full-bodied and low in acidity, which means it is wonderful at fifteen degrees on a summer terrace and slightly overwhelming with a braai chop and the art of the Viognier producer is knowing which context they’re making wine for.
In the Cape, Viognier appears most often blended with Syrah/Shiraz in the Rhône style — a small addition of Viognier, co-fermented with the Syrah, lifting the aromatic profile and deepening the colour through a chemical interaction that nobody entirely understands but that produces, reliably, something better than either grape alone.
The Road to Hell, it turns out, leads somewhere rather good.
RIESLING
The German One That Nobody Orders And Everyone Should
Riesling’s etymology traces to the Middle High German word rĂ®seln, meaning to flow or trickle — a reference, possibly, to the way the grape clusters hang loosely on the vine or to the wine’s characteristic clarity and precision or simply to the fact that someone in medieval Germany watched grapes growing and thought of moving water, which is either poetry or very early tasting note writing.
So Riesling means something like The Trickling One, which for a grape that produces wines of extraordinary, almost crystalline precision — wines of steel and slate and citrus and petrol (yes, petrol, it’s a compliment, Riesling develops a beautiful kerosene quality with age that the Germans call Petroleum and describe with straight faces as desirable) — is quite an elegant name.
South African Riesling is a complicated category. There is Cape Riesling, which is not Riesling at all but an unrelated grape called Crouchen Blanc that arrived in the Cape mislabelled and spent several decades masquerading under a borrowed name, which is either a parable about identity fraud in the wine industry or simply what happens when you ship plants a long distance without enough paperwork.
True Rhine Riesling is made in small quantities by a handful of Cape producers, mostly in cooler sites and is among the most underappreciated bottles in the South African wine landscape. If you find it, buy it. Tell no one. This is currently one of the last good-value secrets remaining in a wine world where everything worth knowing has been discovered, reviewed and given a shelf talker.
The Trickling One trickles quietly. Let it.
MÉTHODE CAP CLASSIQUE (MCC)
The One That Refused To Be Called Champagne And Has Made Peace With This
This is not a grape variety. This is a method. This is South Africa’s answer to the question: “What do we call our sparkling wine when we cannot legally call it Champagne because Champagne is a protected designation of origin belonging to a specific region of France that guards its name with the ferocity of a village that has discovered its surname is internationally famous and intends to monetise this fully?”
The answer, arrived at by the South African wine industry in the 1990s, was: Méthode Cap Classique — the Classic Cap Method, named after the Cape of Good Hope, acknowledging both the French technique (secondary fermentation in the bottle, riddling, disgorgement, the whole laborious, wonderful process) and the South African location in which it is practiced.
It is an honest name. It says: we are doing this the classical way, here at the Cape. It does not pretend to be Champagne. It simply does what Champagne does, with South African grapes, in South African cellars, by South African hands, at a price point that makes the Champagne houses uncomfortable when they bother to pay attention, which they are increasingly doing.
The MCCs of Franschhoek in particular — Graham Beck, Haute Cabrière, Morena — are wines of genuine international standing, made from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir on the cold valley floor, aged on their lees for years, tasting of everything a great sparkling wine should taste of: brioche, lemon curd, green apple, chalk, the specific lightness of bubbles made correctly rather than injected mechanically.
It is not Champagne.
It is, in several blind tastings that have been conducted and then discussed more quietly than the results warranted, difficult to distinguish from Champagne.
The region of Champagne has no official comment.
The MCC winemakers smile.
HANEPOOT
The One With The Greatest Name In The History Of Wine
And finally, a grape with a name that requires no translation into Latin, no connection to a Persian city, no argument about medieval shipping ports.
Hanepoot is Afrikaans. It means Rooster’s Foot — a reference to the thick, claw-like stems that connect the heavy clusters to the vine, which apparently reminded someone, at some point in the Cape’s agricultural history, of the foot of a large chicken.
Hanepoot is Muscat of Alexandria — one of the oldest cultivated grape varieties in the world, grown in Egypt since antiquity, brought to the Cape by Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century. It is fat, sweet, intensely aromatic, capable of producing beautiful fortified wines and sun-dried raisins and dessert wines of honeyed, floral, ancient richness.
It is also, in the warm regions of the Western Cape, eaten as a table grape, which means that somewhere in the Hex River Valley right now there is a family eating grapes whose name means Rooster’s Foot and finding this entirely normal, because it has always been called Rooster’s Foot, because the stem does look like a rooster’s foot, because sometimes the best name for something is simply the accurate one, arrived at by a farmer who looked at what was in front of him and said what he saw.
In a wine world of Persian cities and medieval shipping ports and roads to hell and uncertain Latin roots and arguments about small French hills —
— the Rooster’s Foot is just a Rooster’s Foot.
It is, in its way, the most honest name in wine.
Gesondheid.
🍷 A final note: Several of these etymologies have been simplified, dramatised or approached with the same confidence as a man who has read half a Wikipedia article and filled in the rest with wine. The Cabernet Cabinet Theory remains, officially, untrue. The Rooster’s Foot remains, officially, the greatest name. Everything else is somewhere in between. Cheers.