The world’s oldest soils

The world’s oldest soils

Today Vilafonté sets the standard as one of South Africa’s leading and most cutting-edge premium wineries. So it’s a little odd to think that it all began a little under 30 years ago as an idea … and a quest to uncover the oldest soils in the world.

‘My former business partner, Dr Phil Freese, developed a deep insight into the ancient soils of the world and how they impact the greatest wines,’ Vilafonté’s Mike Ratcliffe tells us. ‘And very quickly his research took him not just to Bordeaux, which is not that old, or Napa, which is not old at all, it took him to Africa, where almost all of the oldest soils in the world are.’

Searching in South Africa, Dr Freese soon established that the very oldest soil of all was a type called Vilafonté. And so began an idea with Phil, Mike and Zelma Long, all armed with long winemaking knowledge and cutting edge Californian expertise, to make the finest wine possible from these most ancient soils.

‘We’ve never bought a grape and we’ve never sold a grape,’ Mike explains. The Vilafonté mission is one of incredible simplicity – to reveal the character of a single astonishing vineyard as precisely as possible.