A moment captured: Tasting history at Klein Constantia

Few wines in the world are designed to outlive their makers. Even fewer can gracefully span four decades and emerge not just drinkable, but extraordinary.

On a crisp afternoon in the Constantia Valley, with Table Mountain casting its shadow over the vineyards, I discovered one such bottle, and with it, a profound truth about South African wine.

The Collector’s Quest

My journey to Klein Constantia that day was the culmination of years of patient hunting. As a collector of Vin de Constance, I’d finally tracked down the white whale of my collection: the 1986 vintage, the very first produced after the estate’s rebirth.

This legendary dessert wine, descendant of the nectar that captivated Napoleon and Jane Austen, had come full circle. Matthew Day, Klein Constantia’s winemaker, would recork it in the coming months.

The conversation that followed would yield something even more precious.

The Question That Changed the Day

“Other than Vin de Constance,” I asked Matthew while enjoying lunch in the Bistro restaurant at Klein Constantia, “which is protected by its sheer volume of sugar, what other wines from the Constantia Valley would still be drinkable from that era?”

The silence that followed was telling. Matthew’s face reflected what we both knew: very few. Perhaps none.

The Constantia Valley, for all its storied history stretching back to 1685, for all its perfect maritime climate and granite soils, has produced wines meant to be enjoyed, not buried for decades. Vin de Constance stands alone as the valley’s immortal, a wine so concentrated, so perfectly balanced between sugar and acidity, that time becomes almost irrelevant. But the dry wines? Even the finest Sauvignon Blancs that have made Constantia famous in the modern era were never intended as messages to the future.

“Very few,” Matthew agreed quietly. Then, with the glint in his eye that only a winemaker raiding his own reserves can have, he added: “But I might have something.”

The Privilege of Perfect Preservation

What emerged from the cellar’s depths was a bottle that looked every one of its 39 years. The 1986 Klein Constantia Sauvignon Blanc, one of only a handful remaining in existence, perhaps one of the last in the world. The label had faded, but the wine within had enjoyed a privilege that few bottles ever know.

“This Sauvignon Blanc has lived in the cellar here at Klein Constantia since the day it was bottled, in perfect conditions,” Matthew explained as he carefully drew the cork.

“Very few wines have that privilege, and very few will last.”

The conditions are critical: constant cool temperatures, ideal humidity, darkness, and stillness. But even rarer is remaining undisturbed for four decades. Most bottles, even when carefully stored, move house, change hands, or fall victim to curiosity long before they reach this age.

Tasting Time

When the wine met glass, and glass met lips, something extraordinary happened. This was not the bright, grassy, tropical Sauvignon Blanc of the modern Cape. This was something that had gone beyond its grape and become purely of its place.

Matthew explained his philosophy on ageing: “When you age wines you allow them to slowly lose their influence by a winemaker. You lose all the flavours that are derived from fermentation and technique and you eventually get to a point that the wine starts to show its pure expression of where it comes from.”

The 1986 Sauvignon Blanc showed exactly that.

“For me it shows the backbone of Sauvignon,” Matthew said.

“It has a lovely nettle, bell pepper, gooseberry, and fig character that is accompanied with a lovely earthy character. This for me is the dried fynbos, leafy, herbaceous character. There are then also the aged characteristics of butterscotch, burnt toast and malva. The acidity is fresh and key to the success of this wine.”

But perhaps most remarkable is the wine’s journey itself.

“The 1986 is a complete yoyo though as it has gone through some really interesting phases,” Matthew revealed.

“When first made it was regarded as the greatest Sauvignon Blanc ever made in South Africa. It aged beautifully until about 2010. It then went through a phase that it didn’t show well at all, it almost aged exponentially and we thought that it was getting to the end of its life, but to my surprise it has somehow been reborn in 2025 and is now showing so well.”

We had caught it at exactly the right moment. A wine that was once South Africa’s finest, that had seemingly faded, had come back to life.

The Mortality of Wine

Matthew’s words as we savoured that remarkable bottle carry a truth every wine lover must eventually face: “The whites live longer than the reds from the Constantia Valley. Very few wines are bottled with the intention of being opened in 40 years’ time.”

Even Vin de Constance, that miracle of preservation, capable of ageing for a century or more, was never intended to last quite this long.

The 1986 vintage, like all wines of its era, was made for a generation, not for eternity. That any remain at all, Klein Constantia keeps only a few bottles in their archives, is testament to restraint and institutional memory.

Wine, unlike other art forms, is temporary in the most absolute sense. A painting can hang for centuries. A book can be read and re-read. But a wine exists to be opened, consumed, to disappear. Each bottle is a death postponed, and each opening is a death embraced.

Finding the Right Grape for the Right Place

The question of why so few dry wines from the Constantia Valley survive is itself a lesson in winemaking.

Unlike Vin de Constance, with its high sugar content acting as a natural preservative, most dry wines were made for elegance, freshness, and immediate pleasure.

But Matthew’s perspective on that 1986 Sauvignon Blanc reveals something deeper about Klein Constantia’s success.

“We have found a special piece of paradise that is perfectly suited to make Sauvignon Blancs,” he explained.

“The site, the location, the proximity to the ocean, the slope, the ancient soil create an environment that allows us to make wines that are authentic to our place and also have the ability to age.”

It’s a philosophy rooted in patience and place rather than fashion.

“We have been very fortunate to be able to focus on making a cultivar that works in the place rather than being forced to follow the trends and plant what doesn’t work on our land. The French realised this hundreds of years ago and it’s part of the reason for their success. You don’t see them planting Cabernet Sauvignon in Burgundy and likewise Pinot Noir in Bordeaux.”

That the 1986 Sauvignon Blanc survived at all, let alone thrived, is not merely an accident. It’s the result of perfect conditions meeting the right grape in the right place, a wine that possessed, unknowingly at the time, the structural integrity to endure.

The Privilege and the Lesson

Drinking a 39-year-old Sauvignon Blanc from Constantia is to experience something that exists at the intersection of intention and accident, of care and luck. It’s a privilege that cannot be purchased, only stumbled upon in the company of someone like Matthew Day, who understands that a winemaker’s legacy sometimes lies not in what is sold, but in what is saved. To share that moment with family made it all the more precious.

As we finished that remarkable bottle, I thought about my completed Vin de Constance collection, and about the 1986 waiting to be recorked. These bottles represent more than wine. They’re time machines, history books, monuments to the fleeting. They remind us that most of what we create is meant to be enjoyed in the moment.

Few wines from 1986 Constantia are still worth drinking. We opened one of them. And in doing so, we experienced not just a piece of history, but a once-in-a-lifetime communion with a moment from 39 years ago, a moment that tasted of earth, of fynbos, and of the patient wisdom of Matthew Day, who knew exactly when to open a wine that was never meant to last this long, but somehow did.

Conclusion

The author is a collector of South African wine with a focus on Vin de Constance. Klein Constantia, established in 1685, is located in the Constantia Valley near Cape Town and is internationally renowned for its recreation of the legendary Vin de Constance dessert wine.