“Vines are kind of like people in a way. When they're young, they're vigorous... some vintages produce too many grapes, and then the quality is not so good because they stress themselves up. But over time, if they have a heatwave or a drought, they become wise. They learn to slow down, produce maybe a little bit fewer grapes. Their roots dig very, very deep into the soil. And that is the secret to old vines.”

– Chris Mullineux, Co-Founder of Mullineux & Leeu Family Wines, South Africa

 

If you ever find yourself at a wine pairing dinner with Chris Mullineux, you’d instinctively sit down, top up your glass, and stop trying to multitask. He entertains so easily with his stories from so many directions: geology, his memories working in the French Rhône Valley, the antics of baboons in vineyards, the inner life of a bush vine. It seems like the man runs almost entirely on wine, sport (rugby) and an unflagging enthusiasm for the soils of the Swartland.

I had the very good luck of catching him recently at Tower Club Singapore, for an intimate wine dinner that Wine to Share Singapore, specialist importer of South African Wines, had pulled together on the back of one of Chris's now-legendary whirlwind passes through the city. He had landed only hours earlier, was scheduled to fly out almost immediately after, and yet, save for a small admission of being “a little bit jet lagged” at the very tail-end of dinner, showed barely a hint of fatigue across the entire long evening.

| Read our in-depth feature on the Mullineuxs and review of their Single Terroir, Signature & Kloof Street Chenin & Syrah Wines

 

 

Here’s the very short version of the story of Mullineux & Leeu Family Wines. Chris and his wife Andrea are founders of Mullineux Winery, one of the most celebrated boutique wineries in South Africa, based out of the Swartland, the great agriculturally-rich farming region just over an hour's drive northeast of Cape Town that, until just a few decades ago, was nobody's idea of a fine wine destination. Chris is South African, having grown up between Cape Town, Johannesburg and Botswana before training at Stellenbosch University; Andrea hails from San Francisco and trained at the famed UC Davis, working harvests across Napa before fatefully meeting Chris on a train ride to Champagne whilst they were both interning at separate Rhône Valley wineries.

They got married in 2007, founded the winery the very same year, and have since become not just two of the leading lights of the so-called Swartland Revolution alongside fellow neighbours and friends Eben Sadie, Adi Badenhorst (of A.A. Badenhorst) and Callie Louw (of Porseleinberg), but reference points for South African winemaking as a whole. Their Roundstone home estate in Kasteelberg, was certified as South Africa's first Regenerative Organic Certified vineyard in 2025, an industry milestone that underlines how seriously they believe high-level farming improves their fruit. As Chris says it, they aren’t just doing it because they’re “hippies”.

Beyond the Mullineux winery itself, Chris and Andrea also helm a second project called Leeu Passant, founded in 2013 in partnership with entrepreneur Analjit Singh. Whereas Mullineux is exclusively focused on Swartland fruit, Leeu Passant ventures outside it, sourcing primarily from old-vine sites in Stellenbosch, Wellington and Franschhoek that Chris and Andrea's longtime viticulturist, the legendary Rosa Kruger, often described as "the queen of the Cape's old vines" and the spiritual godmother of South Africa's Old Vine Project, had been recommending to them for years. Leeu Passant in many ways acts as a sort of love-letter to the great classical heritage red blends of South Africa from the 1950s and 1960s, deliberately reaching into the country's wine memory rather than chasing international styles.

 

Wine map of South Africa today.

 

It is worth saying that South Africa's heritage of fine wine is in fact astonishingly old, predating the now-fashionable Cape dry reds and whites of today. Right up until refrigeration arrived in the 1940s, almost all serious Cape wine was either fortified or made naturally sweet so it could survive long sea voyages, and at one point Constantia's sweet wines were the most famous wines of the world: Napoleon Bonaparte was so devoted to them that he reportedly requested cases be sent to him in exile on Saint Helena, and the wines also turn up tellingly in the novels of Jane Austen. Chris is incredibly proud of this lineage, and the Mullineux winery still makes a wonderful vintage Straw Wine from sun-dried Chenin Blanc grapes alongside an even rarer Olerasay solera bottling, which blends every single vintage of their straw wine made since 2008 in the Spanish Sherry-style fractional ageing system.

 

During his final exile on St. Helena (1815–1821), Napoleon Bonaparte famously consumed over 300 gallons annually of Vin de Constance, a sweet dessert wine from South Africa.

 

The straw wines were not on the dinner pour, but Chris addressed our fascination with real warmth, explaining how an entire rugby field’s worth of fruit would only yield one or two barrels of this stuff. These aren’t meant to be widely commercialised. “We do it because sweet wine is part of our history in South Africa… Napoleon drank those wines. Jane Austen drank those wines. We do it not to get rich, but to celebrate our heritage”

 

 

The dinner format itself was relaxed. Chris had decided early on that there would be no rigid food-and-wine pairings forced on us. “Often, we have these preconceptions about wine. Red wine has to go with this and white wine with that. But often it's not, and there are way more options than what we often believe”, he said, encouraging us to keep multiple glasses going at once and try crossing the lines between courses.

The plan was a flight of two whites, followed by four reds. Before we even sat down, however, we had been warmed up outside the private dining room with two of Mullineux's entry-range Kloof Street wines, an old-vine Chenin Blanc and a Swartland-rouge red blend, the latter a four-grape Rhône-style blend of Syrah, Grenache, Cinsault and a touch of Tinta Barocca. Both showed beautifully fresh and balanced in the early evening. A nice priming of the palate for the proper line-up to follow.

 

 

Chris launched into a very charming framing of his work with grapevines. “Vines are kind of like people in a way. When they're young, they're vigorous, they're growing like crazy. They haven't learned a lot of lessons yet. Some vintages, they produce too many grapes, and then the quality is not so good because they stress themselves up. But over time, if they have a heatwave or a drought, they become wiser. They learn to slow down, produce maybe a little bit fewer grapes. Their roots dig very, very deep into the soil. And that is the secret to old vines”.

It is a defence of why so much of the Swartland fine-wine movement has hung itself on the back of many excellent but overlooked old, dry-farmed bush vines that risk disappearing into anonymous bulk wine production, just hoping for someone like the Mullineuxs to come and finally articulate them. The Old Vine Project, the South African industry initiative that Rosa Kruger helped to establish, formally defines an old vine as one that is at least 35 years of age, and certifies the vineyards on official labels with a small heritage seal showing the year of planting. The wines Chris poured for us that evening drew, to varying degrees, on vineyards old enough to qualify, and one of them was old enough to predate the Boer War.

 

 

The first wine in our glass was the Mullineux Old Vines White 2024, the winery's signature white blend and, by Chris's own admission, "probably our most important wine that we make".

The 2024 vintage is composed of 68% old-vine Chenin Blanc forming the backbone, with a small supporting cast of 14% Clairette Blanche, 6% Sémillon Gris, 6% Grenache Blanc and 6% Viognier, drawn from Mullineux’s oldest sustainably-farmed parcels across the Swartland with vines as old as 72 years.

 

 

This blend is Mullineux at its most synthesised: a deliberate weaving together of all three of Swartland's signature soil types, granite, schist and iron, and several Mediterranean grape varieties on top, into a single chord. Chris described the architecture of it simply: "we take the oldest Chenin Blanc vines we have, these are 72 years old, and we use that as the backbone of the wine, about 70% of the blend, and then we blend in a few other grapes just to make the wine more interesting, more layered, more complex and also extremely balanced". Where the Single Terroir Chenins (one of which we would taste next) try to isolate one soil and one grape, the Old Vines White does the inverse, pulling everything together into one wine that is supposed to express the full vocabulary of the Swartland's white-wine vocabulary at once. It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the wine that has driven Mullineux's astonishing five Platter's Winery of the Year awards (2014, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2023).

On the nose, I found it really mineral-driven from the get-go: rocky and almost stony, with warm buttery edges, white peaches, very well-integrated stone fruit and a sort of faintly ferrous, irony quality alongside little wisps of lavender. The palate was flavourful and a bit richer than the Kloof Street Chenin but with the same freshness and balance. It lit up with lively acidity, peach, a measured ribbon of vanilla, and just the lightest hint of yeastiness leading into a finish that turned faintly savoury and creamy at the close.

 

 

The second white was a striking gear-change. The Mullineux Eikelaan Granite Chenin Blanc 2023 is, in Chris's words, "one of our very rare single-vineyard cuvées.” It's just one hectare in size, yielding just four thousand bottles every year with about two to three cases allocated to Singapore.

The vineyard's name, written in tiny print at the bottom of the label, is "Eikelaan", which Chris helpfully translated for us at the table as Afrikaans for "oak lane", referring to the long row of oak trees you drive past on the way into the property.

 

 

The Eikelaan parcel (Granite Chenin) is one leg of Mullineux's Single Terroir series, a three-soil project of single-vineyard Chenins (alongside the Roundstone Farm (Schist Chenin) and the Rondomskrik Vineyard (Iron Chenin) all picked at the same ripeness and vinified identically, so the only variable on the table is the soil itself. 

Chris also sneaked in a quick mention during the evening that they had recently launched yet another wine alongside the Single Terroir trio, an estate wine simply called “Roundstone”, made from younger plantings of Mediterranean varieties like Assyrtiko and Macabeo at their home farm. He proudly shared that it took twelve years from when they first planted the vines to now release the wine.

 

The Roundstone Farm.

  

Back to the Granite Chenin. Chris explained the essence of why this wine exists: this is one grape – Chenin Blanc – from one site of very deep, decomposed granite soils that force roots to go down even further, making beautifully balanced wine. Granite is the soil that delivers freshness and perfume, the result of those deep, sandy, fine-grained granite profiles that allow vines to dig their roots far down in search of water, while leaving canopies generous enough to shade the fruit from too much sun. Chris observed that granite also generally tends to make wine with higher acidity. The Eikelaan vines were planted in 1976, putting them at 47 years old at harvest in 2023, and the wine sees ten months in older 225-litre French oak barrels, with no bâtonnage and minimal sulphur, allowing the soil and old vine concentration to do the heavy lifting.

It has this wonderful creaminess almost like you would find in a great white Burgundy, but it's Chenin Blanc, with still incredible freshness and vibrancy and finesse at the same time.

On my own tasting it immediately felt more concentrated, more precise, more granite-driven. The nose was rocky and mineral, and much more buttery than the OVW (a useful tasting tell, as Chris had noted that creaminess is the natural giveaway of old, dry-farmed Swartland Chenin and derives from the grapes, not from the winemaking). With apricots, honey, a fine sort of powdery floral tone to it, elderflower and a fresh citrus lift on top. The palate was utterly enveloping, very, very creamy – almost like a great white Burgundy –with a lively dryness underneath, stone fruits and tinned peaches lifted by a biscuity and almost oyster-shell quality. The finish was vanilla-tinged, more buttery still, with this beautifully precise touch of savouriness slicing through.

It was, by some distance, one of the more impressive Chenins I have had this year, dialled in on its acidity but staying flavour-forward and giving. Chris had described its hallmarks as both intensity and precision and that sounds exactly right.

 

Old vine Chenin.

 

We made the slow but very welcome turn from whites to reds with four glasses lining up in front of us. Chris first walked us through the two Swartland Syrahs, sketching out a useful mental shortcut for the Master of Wine students he had been speaking to earlier in the day: “There is actually a cheat for identifying Swartland Syrah. It's in the tannins. So don't worry about the aromas when you taste the wine. Swartland Syrah is always very smooth, very silky. It's never rough, never peppery, never spicy. Swartland Syrah’s tannins are wonderfully smooth and balanced. It's also not very sweet like you can find in some like Barossa Shiraz.”

In other words, Swartland Syrah deliberately occupies the middle ground between the cool-climate, white-pepper-driven northern Rhône style of Côte-Rôtie or Cornas (where rotundone, the chemical compound that gives Syrah its peppery character, often expresses powerfully) and the riper, sweeter, liquorice-forward style of warm-climate Australian Shiraz from Barossa. The result is a regional house style that emphasises silky textures and finely-dialled tannins above all else. Chris was disarmingly candid that this signature didn't come easily to them. “When I started making wine, we tried to make Côte-Rôtie Syrah, and because I worked in Côte-Rôtie, it was my favourite. But we just couldn't. And eventually after five years, we were like let's make a Swartland Syrah. Why try to copy another wine region?" It is the same liberating realisation, in many ways, that the entire Swartland Revolution turns on: stop trying to mimic the Loire when making Chenin, stop trying to mimic the northern Rhône when making Syrah, and let the place speak for itself.

 

 

The first red on the table was the Mullineux Syrah 2021, the signature multi-parcel Syrah that draws on six sustainably-farmed sites: three on schist of the Kasteelberg, two on dry-land bush vines on decomposed granite of the Paardeberg, and one on the iron-rich Koffieklip soils west of Malmesbury. Like the Old Vines White on the white side, this is a blend, marrying three signature Swartland soils into a single bottling.

The 2021 vintage is special for being one of the coolest vintage in recent memory. Chris described an unusually long, cool, wet growing season that delivered reds with lower alcohols and much higher acidities than most South African producers had seen for years. In the bottle, the wine is 90% whole-bunch fermented, sees about 11 months in 500-litre French oak barrels followed by a long second élevage in larger foudres.

 

 

I found it distinctly more savoury than expected, leaning into dark cherries and brambles with little undercurrents of cacao, dried herbs and dried mushrooms on the nose.

The palate showed moderate, grippy but smooth tannins, a really silky textural feel, and more of that cacao and espresso quality. The finish moved into cassis territory with a light savoury tail, slight meatiness, cinnamon, anise, pepper, an interesting woody-cacao note, then a properly earthy, almost soil-driven close. 

A really interesting wine, more savoury than fruity but never austere, and structurally very dialled in.

 

 

Following that came its single-vineyard sibling, the Mullineux Jakkalsfontein Granite Syrah 2021, the Granite expression of the same three-soil framework but for Syrah rather than Chenin Blanc. Just as the Eikelaan Granite Chenin sits amongst the Single Terroir series of whites, the Jakkalsfontein parcel forms the Granite leg of Mullineux's Single Terroir Syrah trio, alongside the Schist Syrah (Roundstone Estate) and Iron Syrah (Kasteelsig Vineyard), all of them identically vinified so that soil is the only variable.

According to Chris, Jakkalsfontein means the jackal's fountain – as the story goes, the place was named after discovery of a nearby fountain that had a family of foxes and jackals. The vineyard sits on the Paardeberg, planted to dry-land bush vines on decomposed granite somewhere around the 1990s. It is a small parcel, producing just 540 cases in 2021. The whole-bunch percentage is also pushed all the way to 100%, a touch higher than the Signature Syrah, and the resulting wine is, on paper at least, a kind of soil-purist statement of granite-grown Syrah.

 

 

On the nose for me, it showed beautifully polished black fruits, real potpourri florality, and this almost satin-like texture even before the first sip. The palate brought cherries, apples, an interesting rich earthiness, a silky Cabernet-leaning structural feel I wasn't quite expecting, black and red fruits beautifully co-mingled, soft oak tones, light earthiness, and very cohesive integration. The finish was soft, slightly chalky, slightly savoury with a minty close. It should continue to open up over the next several years, but the florality, texture and balance are already remarkable.

If anyone were curious why South African fine wines has managed to embed itself so deeply in the worldwide conversation in recent years, you only had to listen to Chris talk about his fellow Swartland producers. What he described, with real evident affection, was a small but tightly knit community of vignerons who genuinely treat one another as friends and collaborators rather than competitors, swapping fruit, comparing notes, dining together, and often farming each other's parcels in alternation. “It's having genuine friends in our neighbourhood. We give to each other and support each other.” This community put themselves on the world stage in a way that no individual producer could have managed alone. That sense of solidarity has also helped them collectively navigate what, in honesty, has been a hard policy environment to operate in.

 

(Source: Victoria Mason MW)

 

Chris pointed out that the South African wine industry still has a long way to go in terms of winning support from policy makers. For instance, South African wines still pay sizeable tariffs into certain BRICS partner markets like India, sometimes up to 150%. “That's a challenge for us because nobody's trying to help to lobby for us. As producers we need to be a team. We have to work together. And in a way it's good because it makes us friends and we love our neighbours. It's actually made us stronger in a way, more resilient.” It is impossible not to admire the way producers like Chris and Andrea, alongside their neighbours and friends, have not just persevered but in many cases redefined the global conversation around South African fine wine.

On the subject of climate, Chris also offered the cheerfully honest observation that what they are dealing with at Roundstone is not so much warming in the conventional sense as it is what he called “climate chaos”: a regional climate where, thanks to the cold Atlantic upwelling running up from Antarctica acting as what he described as a natural radiator for the Cape's west coast, average temperatures haven't actually risen meaningfully in twenty years, but rainfall has become both scarcer and more violent. 

 

Baboons raiding a car near Cape Town (Source: Schalk van Zuydam/AP)

 

When rains do come, they come hard and fast, eroding precious topsoil that takes literally hundreds of thousands of years to replace. This is one of the more practical reasons that Mullineux’s regenerative farming, with cover crops and deep mulch, matters so much.

There is also, according to Chris, a much more colourful local challenge in certain parts of the Cape: baboons. Up in the Constantia region in particular, where the suburban fringes butt up against the vineyards on the slopes of the Cape Peninsula mountains, troops of chacma baboons have grown so accustomed to humans that they will help themselves to ripe grapes during harvest, and woe betide any vineyard worker who tries to chase them off. At Roundstone the situation is gentler, since the local baboons remain wild and skittish, but it is a reminder that real winegrowing in South Africa is, even now, set against a backdrop of mountains, fynbos, wildlife, drought and storms that no European wine region quite has.

 

 

After the two Mullineux Syrahs, we then made the lateral move from the Swartland into the world of Leeu Passant, the second winery, with the third red of the night, the Leeu Passant Stellenbosch Cabernet Sauvignon 2022.

As mentioned, whereas Mullineux is focused on Swartland fruit, Leeu Passant reaches out to old-vine sites in Stellenbosch, Wellington and Franschhoek. This wine we’re tasting was from Stellenbosch which lies east of Cape Town. It is much cooler, close to the ocean, and home of Cabernet Sauvignon in South Africa, which Chris describes as “our Napa Valley or our Bordeaux”.

 

 

On the bottle's back label, the wine reads as a classical, single-variety, single-region Stellenbosch Cabernet, but in the glass Chris made a point of saying that their philosophy here is anything but textbook Stellenbosch: "the secret again of this Cabernet is the tannins. It's got this fresh almost chalky tannin structure, so it's not rough, not too astringent and not too harsh.

It's lovely and harmonious and balanced. And perfect for a warm climate. It's not a heavy sweet jammy style of Cabernet. It's got this balance to it." One of the guests noted how South African Cabernet didn't taste much like Bordeaux. Chris happily explained: “They [South African Cabernets] do have a longer growing season, so the grapes ripen more slowly. And when that happens, you get a riper tannin with changed aromas… It's from the climate and the sunshine. It's not due to winemaking.

 

The Leeu Collection in Franschhoek.

 

On my own tasting, generous red fruits and sweet oak on the nose, with earthiness underneath and a lifted potpourri quality.

The palate was, frankly, very, very drinkable for a Cabernet, which is not always something one says of Stellenbosch reds: a touch of bell-pepper green tones, plenty of black fruits, sweet oak notes, and a pleasingly soft, malolactic-softened acidity feel. The finish was dry, with cacao, red berries, mint, soft dried herbs and oregano.

Real elegance, no over-extraction, and an evocative, savoury character on the nose in particular.

 

 

Then the climax of the evening, the Leeu Passant Wellington Old Vines Basson Cinsault 2020. Strictly speaking, this wasn't on the printed dinner menu at all. Rex, from Wine to Share, had rather generously decided to open it as a special treat, and what arrived in our glass was nothing less than one of the most historically significant wines in South Africa.

The Basson vineyard, a tiny dry-farmed bush vine parcel of just under one hectare in Wellington, the small region tucked between Franschhoek and the Swartland, was planted in 1900, making it 126 years old today. It is South Africa's oldest registered red wine vineyardand a Certified Heritage Vineyard under the Old Vine Project.

Chris put the date in context. 1900 was during the Boer War when the British and Dutch fought for control over the country. Back then, people still rode around on horses. There were still no cars, and no tractors. This vineyard was planted and farmed by hand from the very beginning. 

Chris noted that, standing in the vineyard, one would see that there are no straight rows simply because the vines were grown by hand without the use of equipment like tractors. The vineyard, in other words, has never known mechanisation. It has been farmed entirely by human hand for the entire 126 years of its life.

 

 

The vineyard also carries a deeper significance because Cinsault is itself a kind of forgotten patriarch grape variety in the Cape. Cinsault was once the country's most widely planted red grape, going back not just decades but centuries, until Cabernet Sauvignon arrived in South Africa around the 1920s and 1930s and farmers began ripping up old Cinsault to plant the new noble international variety in its place. The Basson vineyard, meanwhile, only narrowly survived this period of Cabernet expansion thanks to the sentimentality of the farming families who kept the old vines in the ground long after they had stopped being commercially profitable, an act of preservation that the Mullineuxs and Rosa Kruger were eventually able to honour. The Mullineuxs have been farming the Basson site since 2014.

Chris describes the Cinsault grape as “almost like our Pinot Noir”. The grape is brighter in colour and a little lighter than other red wines, although Chris insists that there is always a lovely richness to it.

 

(Source: Danie Nel)

 

In the glass, the 2020 was utterly captivating: bright raspberries and cherries on the nose, a Grenache-like quality to it, Cola, brambles, just the lightest brush of florals, and this clean, slate-like minerality threading through. The palate had more structural backbone than a Pinot Noir, but the wine is also unmistakably a wine of the Cape's deep, sandy alluvial soils with proper grip, with red fruits, a soft acidity and a definite dryness. The finish was crisp, with plum-skin tactility and a mineral close. Light, elegant, not too sweet and not overly austere.

It would feel slightly incomplete not to mention one last digression that came up over the reds. South African Pinotage is widely regarded as the country’s signature grape but it is a famously divisive variety, even among top local producers. Someone asked Chris whether Mullineux would make any, to which he gave his gracefully diplomatic answer: "There are some lovely Pinotages out there, but it's not our favourite grape, so we don't work with it".

Gently pressed on the point, Chris explained that the grape may be capable of charm, but for him it too often seems to demand caution where he would rather be chasing brilliance.

Indeed, Pinotage has long been one of South African wine’s most polarising grapes, described by critics variously as controversial and divisive, even as its best examples have won admirers. The Wine & Spirit Education Trust noted that badly handled examples could show awkward smoky or rubbery notes.

Chris described making Pinotage wine to feel like “driving a Ferrari but only going at forty kilometres an hour because you don’t want to have an accident”. The grape may be capable of charm, but for him it too often seems to demand caution where he would rather be focused on chasing brilliance.

 

The Valley of Constantia by Edward Roworth (1940-1949).

 

South Africa has been making wine since 1659, longer than almost any other New World country, and yet for most of those four centuries the country's wines have been either cooped up by historical circumstance (sweet wines for sea voyages, cooperatives swallowing up old-vine fruit, decades of trade isolation under apartheid) or dedicated to chasing a foreign template (Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Loire, the Rhône). What the Mullineuxs and a small handful of fellow first-generation Swartland producers have done, in just under twenty years, is to flip that script: stop trying to make Vouvray, stop trying to make Côte-Rôtie, stop trying to make Bordeaux, and instead make Swartland Chenin, Swartland Syrah, Wellington Cinsault, Helderberg Cabernet, and have the confidence to stand by all of them on their own terms.

Mullineux remains the more pure, soil-driven, terroir-laboratory side of the operation, with its Single Terroir series and its Old Vines White anchoring a portfolio that increasingly defines what world-class South African Chenin Blanc and Syrah mean. Leeu Passant, by contrast, is like a historian's project, the wing of the family tree that consciously reaches back to South Africa's pre-international past, to old Cape blends like Rustenberg Dry Red and Alto Rouge, to centenarian heritage vineyards like Basson, to grape varieties that the country forgotten it once made beautifully. Together, Mullineux and Leeu Passant feel like the two ends of a single conversation about what fine South African wine can be: one foot in the bold, optimistic, regenerative future of the Swartland; the other foot anchored, very deliberately, in 1900.

That the Mullineuxs have managed to hold both ends of that conversation at once, and to do so with as much warmth, humility and humour, is the very best argument I can think of for why South African wine right now deserves more of your shelf and quite a lot more of your attention.

These beautiful wines are available in limited quantities from Wine to Share Singapore.  

 

@CharsiuCharlie