Fairview in Paarl manages to pull off a remarkable feat — as one of the winelands’ top tourist destinations, the estate also manages to deliver an experience that feels personal and intimate, with a genuine feel of a working farm steeped in heritage and family.
And as a producer of a vast range of different wines, they keep it interesting and never blandly mass-produced — producing both premium and more affordable wines, and experiments with diverse regions, cultivars and winemaking techniques.
That Fairview has not had its soul ‘commercialised’ out of it, despite the multiple tour buses occupying the parking area and a constantly buzzing tasting room and restaurant, is down to Charles Back, the second-generation owner of more than 30 years.
Renowned for his savvy marketing, entrepreneurial flair and constant exploring of new wine regions and winemaking innovation, Back puts Fairview’s blend of commercial success and integrity down to people.
“I have surrounded myself with people who are better than me at seeing things through. I try to make sure I am always the weakest link in the team.
“Finding good people and empowering them with knowledge and training is the best way to unlock the potential of a business. Our team at Fairview can tell the story better than I can,” he says.
The focus on finding the right people goes back to the early 1980s when his father, Cyril, started Fairview’s now famous and multi-awarded cheese business.
“He had an idea about making goat’s cheese and I asked him if he was mad! He bought 400 Swiss goats that had been stranded in Swaziland after a collapsed government initiative.
“He built a little dairy and started making cheese. In the beginning, it was all inedible and we managed to get every possible cheese disease!”
Realising that he needed someone who knew what they were doing, Back lured Louis Lourens away from Simonsberg, and the master cheesemaker is still part of the business, which is now SA’s largest speciality cheese producer.
It’s the people who make Fairview’s story their own that make the experience so warmly hospitable, personal and richly informative.
Their passion and commitment to the place is tangible — Back’s philosophy in action.
Wine adviser Marco Duiker, who guided our Heritage & Innovation tasting, is a case in point.
A great storyteller, knowledgeable on not only Fairview but also on winelands history and wine lore, he clearly loves the place and his job because, as he puts it, “we are encouraged to have an ‘ownership mindset’ here”.
Fairview has a number of wine-tasting options, focused, says Back, on “a personal tasting experience, giving the customer what they can only get here”.
A clever innovation to handle the large numbers of visitors in Fairview’s main tasting area is a number of barrel-shaped “tasting pods”, each seating around a dozen guests with a dedicated wine adviser presenting the tasting, all accompanied by Fairview cheeses — a set-up that actually enables serving more people than before, in a more intimate and sociable experience.
The master tasting room is geared to small groups, presenting seated, tutored tastings of the farm’s more unusual, premium and older vintage wines, paired with cheeses, cured meats, fresh farm bread and the farm’s own olive oil.
We tasted the Bloemcool range — small-batch, once-off wines that enable self-expression and creativity for the winemakers, experimenting with unusual cultivars, forgotten vineyards, or alternative winemaking techniques.
The “unapologetically original” range nods to the farm’s heritage — Bloemkoolfontein was the original name given to the Fairview farm in the 1600s — and includes a fascinating array of wines, a great way to explore different cultivars and winemaking techniques including foot pressing, natural ferments, drip method and basket-pressing.
Grenaches noir and blanc, pinot grigio, a shiraz vs syrah tasting, the aptly named Monster, a blend of tempranillo and durif, a dry muscat, a white blend of old vine chenin, palomino and grenache blanc — all intriguing, complex, characterful, with great stories — a range well worth exploring.
Our tasting ended with a rare treat — the 2000 vintage of Fairview Primo Pinotage, the farm’s benchmark single vineyard pinotage, showing power with sensual elegance, pure bright fruit and tannin backbone still there after a quarter of a century. Just exquisite.
The number of different cheeses made by Fairview is probably exceeded by the vast variety of brands and labels in the wine portfolio.
Back abandoned the “estate wine” concept in the 1980s, choosing rather to “go where the terroir is”, and Fairview today is one of few farms that own all their own vineyards, stretching from the home farm on the slopes of Paarl Mountain, to Stellenbosch, the Swartland and Darling.
The “new frontier”, he says, is Darling, producing the best grapes of the Swartland, benefiting from both good soils and the cool maritime climate.
Great examples seen in Fairview’s Regional Revival range include Homtini, a blend of sangiovese, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, shiraz and petit verdot, and the Bordeaux-style white blend of sauvignon blanc and semillon in Altesse.
A visit to Fairview isn’t complete without three things — saying hi to the goats in their iconic goat tower; stocking up on their cheeses, breads and preserves at the deli; and a meal at The Goatshed restaurant, serving up farm-style comfort food and platters of Fairview cheeses, using produce from the farm as far as possible.
Breads come from the on-site artisan bakery, olive oil is grown and produced on the farm, fresh produce is from the garden, yoghurt and eggs are from the farm, and the cheeses, of course, and naturally all paired with Fairview wines.
The experience is slick, well-run, but personal, warm and intimate — “slick but never schlock” as Back puts it.
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