The Anthonij Rupert Red Wine Cellar

The primary working principle of the cellar is to preserve everything the fruit has to offer in the process of making the wine: by dealing with selected grapes in small, individual batches; by handling the berry and the juice as gently as possible; by controlling temperatures at all times; by timing everything precisely. At all stages, sophisticated technology, machinery and equipment have been provided to assist the winemakers.

But, rather than at the expense of the human touch, these sophisticated and creative systems enable the winemakers to keep an even sharper eye and more velvet-gloved hand on the fruit and the wines. Having picked individual vineyard blocks up to as many as five times (and always in the cool early morning hours) to gather fruit at optimum flavour concentration and natural acidity, vineyard staff deliver the grapes in small 15kg lug boxes transported in cold trucks directly to a cold room on the ground floor of the small, circular red-brick cellar. While pickers are trained to select only the best bunches, these are again hand-sorted in the cold-room and, once destemmed on a vibrating table, the berries are subjected to yet a third scrutiny.

Designed by an architect and structural engineer who specialise in winery construction, and who collaborated closely with the owner and his winemakers, the cellar has three levels, two of which are submerged in the ground. Everything is designed and installed to allow free movement of the berries, juice and wine by gravitational force - there is no pumping. The system also allows for immediate isolation and separate treatment of small batches of exceptional fruit, which are fermented in small 225l or 500l French oak barrels for the top tier of Anthonij Rupert single varietal red wines.

These barrels are fitted with a cylindrical perforated metal plunger inserted through a hole in one end of the barrel made of clear, tinted Perspex. The barrels are then lowered with a metal clamp down the manhole in the ground level floor and through another manhole into the subterranean red-brick, barrel-vaulted barrel fermentation and maturation cellar. Mounted on curved metal frames with castors, each barrel is manually revolved every four hours for several days to facilitate thorough skin contact. A special seal on the plunger is also regularly eased to release carbon dioxide.    

On the second level, below ground, large traditionally cone-shaped, wide-based wooden and stainless steel fermenters are arrayed on top of epoxy-coated, metal-clad concrete tanks along the wall of the circular outer perimeter. Spanning the roof is a massive 32-ton cast iron mechanism designed by the cellar's structural engineer to work on the principle of a mechanical watch flywheel. Push-button operated, the wheel moves two steel gondola buckets along a circular track. Berries from the ground floor above are dropped into the gondola positioned beneath a hole in the second-level ceiling and ferried along the track to a particular fermenter into which they're disgorged.