A South African in Wales

An afternoon with Jean du Plessis, Ancre Hill Estates, Monmouth

The first question I asked Jean was an obvious one; what, exactly, is a South African winemaker doing in Wales? He smiled as if he'd been waiting for it. The answer, it turned out, was simpler and more revealing than I expected: the opportunity to work fully biodynamically was too tempting to turn down. Biodynamic winemakers exist in South Africa, he told me, but they are rare. After eighteen vintages learning his craft there, cutting his teeth, building his instincts, becoming the winemaker he wanted to be - Jean knew that his next chapter had to be one of full immersion. That chapter came in the form of Ancre Hill.

So he packed up his life. His wife, their eighteen-month-old son, and a small black cat - the very same cat that now sits quietly on the label of the Ancre Hill Pinot Noir, all made the move to Monmouth. Lock, stock, and one very well-travelled feline.

We spent the morning outside in the bright Monmouthshire sunshine alongside brooding clouds, before we went near a barrel. Jean walked me through the preparations - the teas and tisanes that form the backbone of biodynamic vineyard care at Ancre Hill. Chamomile, yarrow, willow bark, oak bark, among several others, each prepared with a specific purpose and a specific method. Some are cold-brewed, flowers and leaves bundled into large sacks and left to steep. Others are gently heated to around 45 degrees to draw out their vital compounds before being diluted with water and applied directly to the vines.

What struck me was how much of this philosophy begins not with the vine but with the soil beneath it. Jean is quietly obsessed with soil health - worm counts, microbial diversity, the complex, invisible ecosystem that makes everything above ground possible. To reduce tractor passes and the compaction they cause, Ancre Hill has recently invested in a drone spraying system. It is a pragmatic, modern solution in service of a very ancient idea: leave the ground as undisturbed as possible.

He offered an analogy that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Imagine, he said, a full car park, every space taken, engines running, a hive of activity. That car park is your vineyard's microbiology: bacteria, fungi, organisms of every kind competing, coexisting, keeping the ecosystem in balance. Spray agrichemicals - fungicides, herbicides - and you empty the car park. Dramatically, suddenly, completely. And once it's empty, the bad actors move in. Fungal disease finds no resistance, no competition, nothing standing in its way. The lesson being: a full car park is your best defence. Diversity is protection.

We walked the vinesband Jean pointed out the plants and grasses growing between each row - a deliberate, carefully managed cover crop that supports everything from insect life to soil structure. No-till farming. No herbicides. A landscape that is as much wildlife habitat as it is vineyard. As a buzzard flew overhead, Jean mentions there is a nesting family on the estate along with kestrels. For Jean, this is not incidental. Apex predators, he explained, only exist where the full food chain beneath them is healthy. Buzzards mean insects. Insects mean healthy soil. Healthy soil means great grapes.

We stood at the top of the vineyard and looked out across what Jean described as a large, gently undulating bowl - the mesoclimate that makes Monmouth quietly remarkable for viticulture. The rainfall here is around 25% of what falls on Cardiff. The slopes are south-facing. The free-draining mudstone and sandstone soils shed water quickly - critical in the Welsh climate. It may have been serendipity that Richard Morris first walked this land and saw its potential. But standing up there with Jean, it felt like something more inevitable than accidental.

Inside the winery, the conversation shifted to the wines themselves. Ancre Hill's primary varieties are Chardonnay and Pinot Noir - the noble grapes of Burgundy, and Jean's great loves. Alongside them sit hybrid PIWI varieties, increasingly common among UK producers for their natural disease resistance, plus a portion of Albariño used in the estate's orange wine. That orange wine, Jean told me, has evolved considerably. Earlier vintages were high in phenolic extraction and acidity - challenging for some drinkers. The current style is softer, more textural, blending Albariño with Chardonnay, Solaris, and a touch of Pinot Noir. The result is something genuinely surprising: an orange wine you actually want to drink.

We tasted the Pinot Noir across three vintages - 2020, 2021, and 2022 - the last of which holds a particular significance as Jean's first harvest at Ancre Hill. A warm vintage, he noted, with more ripeness than is typical here. We tasted it from Stockinger barrels, Austrian coopers renowned for applying the very lightest toast, often steam-treated rather than flame-charred - from a large Foudre that Jean favours for the Pinot. The effect on the wine is precisely the point: these are not oaky wines. What Stockinger oak does, used with this kind of restraint, is create the conditions for slow, gentle maturation, the fruit captured and elevated rather than obscured. The 2022 was fresh, vibrant, and unmistakably of this place: ripe but precise, with only the faintest whisper of the barrel behind it, exactly as it should be. It remains, for me, the standout wine of the estate.

The fermentation vessels at Ancre Hill deserve a mention of their own. Alongside conventional stainless steel and oak barrels, there are four concrete eggs and seven concrete cubes, though Jean was quick to point out they are not strictly concrete at all, but clay, lined with lime. That lime lining matters: in a cool climate, the grapes arrive with high acidity and low pH, and the lime provides a gentle buffering effect. Each of the seven cubes, despite appearing identical, behaves differently. Jean and the team have named them after the seven dwarfs, as each one brings its own distinct character to whatever you put inside. It is one of those details that tells you everything about how wine is made here: with seriousness, with curiosity, and with the knowledge that even a cube of clay has its own personality.

I asked Jean, at the end, about community - about what it means to arrive in a relatively new wine region and try to build something collectively. He spoke warmly about the growing community of around fifty winemakers now working in Wales, and his conviction that if they share and exchange ideas openly, the whole region benefits. It is a philosophy I recognise and deeply believe in. I mentioned Swartland in South Africa and Burgenland in Austria, two regions I admire, that have transformed their reputations in a relatively short space of time precisely because their winemakers chose to pool knowledge, exchange energy, and build a collective identity rather than compete in isolation. Jean lit up. That, he said, is exactly the kind of model he wants to help build in Wales. I find that genuinely admirable - and I think it will work.

I ended by asking him two questions that felt connected. What is the secret to making great wine? And what does ‘wine freedom’ mean to him? He paused, then said the two answers were really the same answer. The secret to great wine is growing great grapes. And the best way he knows to grow great grapes is under a biodynamic philosophy. Start there, he said, and you're most of the way home.

As for freedom, he looked around the winery, at the barrels and the eggs and the cubes named after dwarfs, at the hillside visible through the window, and said that this, right now, is what freedom looks like for him. The freedom to explore biodynamics fully, without compromise. The freedom to experiment, including a Solera-style Chardonnay project he is quietly developing on the side. The freedom, at this stage of his life, to follow his passion somewhere it had never been followed before.

We clinked glasses over the orange wine. Gave each other a quick cheers. And called it a day.