The Ahrens Family

Story

Albert Ahrens, a dab hand at the pizza oven and like many of the Cape's new generation an engaging raconteur, was the winemaker at Lammershoek at the birth of the Swartland Revolution, before dipping into a number of joint and solo projects including working with Pieter Walser on BLANKbottle, culminating in the Ahrens Family Wines. He's your bona fide kissie wynmaker ("kissies" are the grape crates used during harvest), driving as much as 45,000km per year between vineyards, tenaciously accessing some of the finest fruit in the Cape, then making the wines his small cellar at Wildepaardejacht south of Paarl, a serene spot beneath the Du Toitskloof mountains. Then there’s his MCC, under the separate House of GM & Ahrens label and cellared in Franschhoek, further adding to the odometer. His are what Albert describes as "address specific wines", where the unique characteristics of where the grapes are grown matters more than the identity of the grapes themselves. Production volumes are tiny, maybe one to three thousand bottles of each wine, sometimes just a few hundred.