EVERY generation has its leaders and its innovators, and the Cape wine industry can look back over the past 50 years or so at several who have left an indelible mark.

In the decades following the Second World War, those who embraced the idea of cold fermentation — NC Krone at Twee Jongegezellen is the name most often associated with this approach to white-wine-making — transformed an entire industry. Working from his experience, the team at Stellenbosch Farmers Winery used the technology to create some of the biggest wine brands in the world.

Gunter Brozel at Nederburg was a comparable force in the field of quality red-wine production and the single most important innovator in the field of noble late harvest dessert wines. In a career in which the period from the mid-1950s until the beginning of the 1980s was the most important, Brozel not only made some of the Cape’s most iconic and long-lived reds, he also created new blends, auction cuvees and accessible — yet not simple — popular ranges. Without his creativity, it is unlikely that the wine market of today would have the reach and following that it enjoys.