Samuel Johnson, the man sometimes credited with writing the first comprehensive English dictionary, famously said that “he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy”.
Brandy was once the hero of SA’s spirit market — accounting for about 56% of all spirit sales in the early 1980s. But as the country opened up after democracy, and more cognacs and whiskies arrived, its star faded. Today it accounts for about 30% of the spirit market, with Klipdrift and Richelieu the biggest sellers.
Now, however, SA’s brandy pundits believe there’s an opening for the spirit to regain its lustre — and make an unprecedented push into global export markets. For one thing, KWV was named the world’s best producer of brandy and cognac at the International Wine and Spirits Competition this month. This came only weeks after the Stellenbosch-based Van Ryn’s walked off with the “World’s Best Wine Brandy” award for its 20-year-old potstill brandy.
This wasn’t a fluke — local brandy producers have won the International Wine and Spirits competition 16 times, more than any other country.
Those who know a bit about SA’s brandy heritage weren’t surprised.
Many are acquainted with SA’s rich wine pedigree, with the first cultivars produced in 1659. But the first brandy was distilled soon after, in 1672, when a thousand litres of wine was used to make 130 litres of brandy. That first brandy was named after a ship called De Pijl, anchored in Table Bay at the time. Some reports say it was made on board, by the ship's cook.
Since then, brandy has become an indelible part of the SA culture — and it’s not just the cliché of loutish dads at mid-morning rugby matches, heckling their offspring while indulging in Klippies and Coke, or boozed up university students.
In the Eastern Cape, for example, brandy is often used as lobola, and aspiring grooms know they have to splash out for a good bottle.
And there are plenty of good bottles that threaten to break the bank.
The KWV centenary brandy, for example, sells for R100,000 a bottle.
With such a rich heritage, it seems remarkable that brandy sales are dwarfed by SA’s wine industry. While wine contributes R50bn to the country’s GDP, brandy’s contribution is just R2bn.
And unlike SA wine, brandy exports are vanishingly small.
This ought to change, say the experts. An article in Forbes points out that SA brandy isn’t well known in the US. It says this is “unfortunate, because SA makes some of the world’s greatest brandies”.
SA sits at a lowly ninth on the list of global exporters, with just 1.9% of global sales. The list is headed by India, the world’s biggest seller of brandy, followed by the Philippines, the US and Russia.
But SA has a chance to change this trajectory right now.
“We’ve got a golden opportunity at the moment in that there’s a shortage worldwide of cognac, especially Hennessy,” says Christelle Reade-Jahn, director of the SA Brandy Foundation.
The cognac shortage is particularly acute when it comes to the largest seller, Hennessy, which sells 50-million bottles a year.
Reade-Jahn says this shortage means cognac prices are likely to rise, which opens a gap for brandy. “Our prices are actually better than cognac’s and our quality is as good, if not better. So we need to get in there quickly,” she says.
The brandy acolytes aren’t wasting time in hitting the marketing trail. Last month the foundation hosted a “brandy tasting” for journalists at the Test Kitchen Carbon in Rosebank. For some, it was their first taste of the spirit.
Says Reade-Jahn: “Brandy, for me, is not like wine, which you can just swirl around your mouth, swallow and move on. You need to spend time with it. That’s why I work incredibly well with the sommeliers.”
Now to make SA brandy an aspirational drink ...
It’s no small task to try to emulate cognac’s success. What cognac has done well is to fashion a sought-after brand based on its geography.
Cognac is a French brandy — it can only be called Cognac if it’s made in a particular region in France, and every part of the value chain comes from there.
SA’s brandy masters are debating whether to try to build a similar geographical identity around local brandy: the Cape Brandy Distillers Guild is working on creating awareness for SA’s “quality potstill or Cape brandies”.
Not that there is any hostility between SA’s local brandy masters, and those from Cognac.
Reade-Jahn says SA brandy masters “go and spend a lot of time in Cognac and we get reciprocal visits from Cognac masters, who spend time here.”
She says SA brandy is superior to brandy from India or the Philippines, which are made from cane sugar, and can be sweetened with caramel colour and flavourant. “It can be a very rough tasting spirit — so people then assume that all brandy is like that,” she says.
SA brandy is different for many reasons. Typically, it lies still for between three and 30 years, and is largely divided into three types: potstill, blended and vintage. This comes at a cost, as 3%-5% evaporates annually.
“After 20 years you’ve lost 60% of your volume in the air, gone — but that gives us gold,” she says. That evaporation, she says, is called “the angels’ share”.
But there are also notable differences between SA brandy and that produced in Cognac.
SA’s wine-producing regions are warmer and dryer than Cognac’s, resulting in much higher sugar levels in the grapes. And Cognac’s base wine is usually about 8% alcohol against the 10%-12% in SA, where the distilled wine is usually from chenin blanc or colombard grapes — two varieties high in acidity.
Locally, about 94% of all the brandy sold is “blended brandy”.
But that isn’t the tipple that Reade-Jahn is pushing.
“A blended brandy has been made to be mixed, so it is not a neat serve,” she says. “Potstill or Cape Brandy has been matured to soften and to give aroma, these are the products we serve neat.”
It is these varieties that are trying to compete with cognac, which itself is enjoying a renaissance in the US, due to its savvy use of “brandy influencers”. Rapper Nas, for one, has partnered with Hennessy US for years, while Snoop Dogg has partnered with Landy Cognac from Ferrand.
Local marketers could take a trick out of that book.
As Wine Mag recently put it, Soweto shebeen owners say brandy’s prestige could be bolstered if the producers were to hold regular township tastings. Reade-Jahn says there’s a brandy for every segment of a heavily divided market.
“There are days when I do a two-day event in Langa, in the township ... I can work in a shebeen one week and at the Test Kitchen the next week, because there are brandies for everybody.”
Actually, Soweto is already a thriving and loyal market for brandy drinkers. Many shebeen owners there started their businesses with brandy, especially with KWV. “It’s a real rainbow-nation product and we just need to back in there and take back what we’ve allowed Cognac to take.”
And now for the ‘Brandy Bar’ ...
Kurt Schlechter is the co-owner and director of Cause Effect Cocktail Kitchen and Cape Brandy Bar at the V&A Waterfront.
An award-winning bartender with 70 brandies in his portfolio, he was voted 46th on the list of the world’s Top 100 influential people in the drinks industry by Drinks International Magazine in 2020.
Schlechter is in the process of opening two more stores (one at Morgenhof Wine Estate, the other in Rondebosch) due to the growing interest in brandy locally. “We are still winning all the brandy awards, and the chenin blanc and colombard grapes have this unique fruitiness,” he says.
He says his interest in the spirit was piqued when he first discovered that some of the world’s oldest cocktails were based on brandy or cognac — brandy is mentioned 44 times in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.
“Summer brandies”, he says, are particularly popular now — an example would be a three-year-old brandy that can be drunk in a spritz like soda water or prosecco, or put in a cocktail.
This growth is coming from those aged between 25 and 35, even though brandy still has a long way to go before it outsells whisky, gin or vodka.
Kurt Schlechter is the co-owner and director of Cause Effect Cocktail Kitchen and Cape Brandy Bar at the V&A Waterfront.
An award-winning bartender with 70 brandies in his portfolio, he was voted 46th on the list of the world’s Top 100 influential people in the drinks industry by Drinks International Magazine in 2020.
Schlechter is in the process of opening two more stores (one at Morgenhof Wine Estate, the other in Rondebosch) due to the growing interest in brandy locally. “We are still winning all the brandy awards, and the chenin blanc and colombard grapes have this unique fruitiness,” he says.
He says his interest in the spirit was piqued when he first discovered that some of the world’s oldest cocktails were based on brandy or cognac — brandy is mentioned 44 times in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.
“Summer brandies”, he says, are particularly popular now — an example would be a three-year-old brandy that can be drunk in a spritz like soda water or prosecco, or put in a cocktail.
This growth is coming from those aged between 25 and 35, even though brandy still has a long way to go before it outsells whisky, gin or vodka.
— And now for the ‘Brandy Bar’
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