If ever there’s a topic to keep the conversation bubbling and bottles being opened and emptied around the dinner table, it would be that of South Africa’s best wine.

My own input would go like this: ‘We’ve yet to make the best wine – wine being a journey rather than a destination.’ Have we even planted the variety or varieties to produce such excellence?

At the recent Cape Wine 2015 show, I attended viticulturist Rosa Kruger’s seminar titled ‘Listening to the Landscape – the typicity of terroir’. In the final presentation, winemaker Eben Sadie declared: ‘We should plant what belongs, not what sells,’ before guiding us through the first or early fruits of varieties new to South Africa: whites – albariño (Spain), verdelho (Portugal), assyrtiko (Greece), and reds – mencia (Spain), agiorgitiko (Greece) and nero d’avola (Italy). Who’s to say, in years to come, that one of these won’t make South Africa’s best wine?

But that could be far in the future. What, among well-established varieties, could be serious contenders now?

It might seem counterintuitive to mention a white variety as South Africa’s best wine. Surely it’s reds that produce the greater, more ageworthy wines, some will ask. Well, do we know that for sure? With the belief that whites don’t have the longevity of reds, few winelovers bother to keep them.