Blank Bottle: Producer profile plus 13 wines to seek out

Each year in the Western Cape, the Vintners Surf Classic competition takes place, a surfing contest where more than 50 winemakers from South Africa take to the ocean to go head-to-head in the waves. The competition was started in 2000 by a group of winemakers who hated golf but loved to surf.

The reigning Vintners Surf Classic champion is Pieter Walser, the blond-haired whirlwind behind the Blank Bottle label, but he’s too modest to talk about it himself.

It came to light over lunch following a recent tasting held by Walser’s UK importer Swig. ‘It’s no surprise that he won, as he lives on the beach,’ said one fellow winemaker and surf competitor, partly in jest.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores of 13 Blank Bottle wines to try

The formative years

Growing up, Walser dreamed of becoming a pro surfer. ‘It was always my focus,’ he says, but he never dreamed of becoming a winemaker. He came into wine via an unlikely and circuitous route.

After leaving school he worked in agricultural research because he ‘didn’t really have good enough grades to go to university’, but that didn’t excite him, so he took off travelling for a few years.

It was during his time in Europe that his interest in wine was piqued. In London he found himself enjoying styles of wines he’d never come across before, then he took a job in a vineyard in Alsace and it was here the wine bug took hold.

‘I was happy in the vineyard, but then I moved into the winery and I thought “this is super cool; maybe I should do this?”’ he says.

On his return to South Africa he managed to get a place on the winemaking course at Stellenbosch University, while at the same time selling wine to help pay the fees.

He was buying unlabelled wine from local wineries and selling it to family members and friends, and then to members of the public as word spread about his little venture. ‘I sold 4,600 bottles in six weeks,’ he recalls, ‘so I kept on buying and selling wine with no labels.’

This is where the Blank Bottle name came from, first used by Walser when he set up his own winemaking enterprise in 2003 after leaving university.

He bought whatever second-hand equipment he could lay his hands on and started making wine in a friend’s garage from small quantities of fruit sourced from wherever he could find it in the Western Cape.

Today, he still sources fruit from across the region but is a little more clued up about what to look for in a vineyard site, and how to work alongside growers to achieve the best results.

Strength in numbers

From its humble beginnings, making just two or three wines in a garage, Blank Bottle now produces 120,000 bottles annually under more than 40 different labels. The number of wines made each year fluctuates, but that’s still a staggering number of cuvées.

‘We’re not chasing a number,’ insists Walser. ‘Each year we make what we like, and if we like it, we bottle it. If we don’t like it, it doesn’t go into bottle.

‘I don’t like perfect wines,’ he adds. ‘It’s boring to go down that road. I like wines with a bit of an edge, a little bit of a flaw – that’s what excites me.’

The Blank Bottle business model is far from traditional and Walser puts this down to the fact that he’s never worked for another winemaker in South Africa, and has therefore never had someone to influence how he makes and sells wine.

‘Other winemakers, they started making wine with those philosophies,’ he explains. ‘These philosophies were formed by someone prominent in their life that they worked for and it has then developed over the years. I didn’t have anybody.’

In terms of the process of making dozens of different wines each vintage, some in tiny quantities, and then marketing and selling each one, he wouldn’t recommend it to others.

‘I admit I’ve got the worst business in the wine world,’ he laughs. ‘Nobody copies me because nobody’s stupid enough to do that! You would rather focus on a few wines and that’s it,’ he says.

Blank Bottle at a glance

Founded 2003

Owner Pieter Walser

Winery location Somerset West, Western Cape

Annual crush 185 tonnes (2022)

Annual production 120,000 bottles

Number of cuvées more than 41

Number of varieties farmed more than 35

Key vineyard areas Wellington, Darling, Elgin, Stellenbosch, Paarl

Core wines Orbitofrontal Cortex, Luuks, Retirement @ 65

This maverick approach certainly suits Walser, and what he lacks in the sense of commercial straightforwardness he makes up for in his brilliant marketing – or ‘storytelling’, as he likes to put it.

Each one of Walser’s cuvées is focused on the story of the wine, rather than a grape variety or style. And these elements fall into place as part of the larger story.

‘For the very first wine I made, in 2003, I wrote an essay,’ he says. ‘I gave that essay a title, which became the wine’s name, and I’ve been doing that ever since.’

Some of these tales are extraordinary. One deals with how he was almost arrested after the police suspected him of killing his son and burying him in a neighbour’s garden.

The story inspired the wine Familiemoord – which translates as the murder of a parent or near relative – and the wine’s label features the article from local newspaper the Cape Argus recounting his brush with the law.

You can find these wine essays on the Blank Bottle website alongside audio recordings of Walser telling the tale of each wine. They make for an interesting listen (the one for Little William is especially captivating) and add some context to the project as a whole.

As well as naming each wine, Walser also designs every label, and bottles his wines in a variety of differently shaped bottles, seemingly to make his working life even more complicated.

Clearly, a narrative thread runs through the wines, but so does a sensory one – a signature richness and profound fruit character. There’s a purity and laser-like focus across the range which, when asked, Walser struggles to put his finger on.

Maybe it’s the négociant approach that shapes this style, the ability to select parcels of grapes from numerous places and not get bogged down by working with the same varieties every year. Maybe it’s his ‘from the roots up’ approach, which leans heavily on using old oak vessels and spontaneous fermentations.

His humble beginnings certainly played a part, and this comes across clearly when talking to Walser.

‘Money doesn’t make good wine,’ he states. ‘It’s nice to have money, but an excess of money doesn’t make a good wine. Sometimes not having cash drives you in a direction that actually works.’

‘At the end of the day, for some weird reason, we are doing something that works, and it was never done intentionally,’ he adds.

‘I’m just so grateful, because it’s just a miracle that it has. It could have gone completely wrong, so I’m super relieved that it turned out this way.’

Blank Bottle: 13 latest-release wines

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