Hilko Hegewisch – Solms-Delta Winemaker
As a winemaker, he rapidly gained a reputation for pushing boundaries. Today he’s living his dreams with another dreamer, and “it’s great to have my feet back in the cellar.” Hilko Hegewisch, winemaker at Solms-Delta in Franschhoek, chalked up 18 years of winemaking in the Cape before starting his own company, which supplies some 20 million closures to the wine industry annually.
He spent 13 of these years at Boschendal, where he made the wine that won the first-ever Chenin Blanc Challenge held by Wine magazine. The champion wine, punted as South Africa’s first serious wooded Chenin, was testimony to his joy in challenge and experiment. But independence, mischief and a desire to innovate do not thrive in a corporate environment, and he left the Anglo-American owned wine farm in 1995.
Challenge was integral to his accepting the position as Solms-Delta winemaker: a forgotten wine farm, planted solely to Rhône varieties, owned by a wine-loving neuroscientist. He admits that his initial reaction was: “What does a scientist know about making wine?” Once over his hesitation – “he reels you in”, he said of owner Mark Solms – the two wine-lovers developed a rapport that has culminated in a joint venture to produce some Solms-Delta wines. The fact that Mark is open to ideas and fully prepared to listen is an essential part of Hilko’s job satisfaction.
Winemaking was not his first choice of career. A graduate of the Hotel School in Johannesburg, his first job was at the Town House hotel in Cape Town. But whereas wine appealed, wine-waitering did not. A year with the Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery as a cheese and wine promoter convinced him to study winemaking at Elsenburg College. After a stint in Germany, he joined Boschendal, becoming cellarmaster in 1989.
With his experience of the Franschhoek climate and soil, Hilko endorses the choice of Rhône varieties planted on the farm. “We’re concentrating on Viognier, Grenache, Shiraz and Mourvèdre, but are looking for qualities and experimental winemaking approaches that will give our wines an edge. Like our grapes from one of South Africa’s only three Grenache Blanc vineyards, which are desiccated to concentrate the flavour in a natural way.”
As the winemaker at Solms-Delta, he’s right behind Mark’s adoption of the ancient Greek practice of desiccation (“strangling” grapes on the vine for added intensity) and had even played with the concept of sun-dried grapes during his years at Boschendal. He jokes that he’s now the one to tell Mark to cool it and slow down. “It’s wonderful to encounter such enthusiasm. But I’m older and more realistic today.”
Delighted by the results of South Africa’s first desiccated dry wine – which he engagingly describes as “even better than I’d expected” – Hilko Hegewisch is enthusiastic about the body, tannins and intense flavour. But there’ll be no strangulation of the farm’s Lekkerwijn Rosé. “Desiccation is concentration,” he explains. “A Rosé should be elegant and lively, not robust.”
And those concentrated tannins in the maiden red Solms Hiervandaan? No problem, he says. There are ways of softening tannin: pump-overs and maturation. And he emphasises that ageing wine is part of the Solms winemaking philosophy. It’s obvious that he is back where he belongs. His enjoyment is palpable when he sums up his feelings with the words: “This is not a job – it’s a pleasure.”
Hilko welcomes you to enjoy a tasting of Solms-Delta wines at the estate, or from any of the various stockists and restaurants around the globe.
