Lukas van Loggerenberg

Lukas grew up in the Breedekloof valley, in South Africa’s bulk wine producing heartlands. But instead of wine, he’d always dreamed of being a doctor: the son of a single mother, financially this wasn’t viable. So he did a harvest at a local cooperative, which led to him going to Elsenberg to study winemaking.

He started his career working at a large estate, making oaky, heavily extracted wines - as far as you could imagine from his wines today. It was two harvests spent in the USA that opened Lukas’ eyes to fine wine, as he met people who opened bottles of top Burgundy and Bordeaux.

Drinking these made Lukas realise that these wines all had something in common: a sense of place, and the passion of the winemakers behind them. And that informs Lukas’ winemaking today. As he himself explains, “You can have the world’s best horse, but if you have a bad jockey it won’t win anything. A jockey’s job is like a winemaker’s - to guide that horse over the finishing line”.