Address: Suid-Agter-Paarl Road Suider-Paarl 7646 South Africa
Phone: +27 21 863 2450
Website: www.fairview.co.za
Open, except for New Years Day, Good Friday and Christmas
Monday thru Thursday from 8:30AM to 5:00PM/Saturday from 8:30-4:00 and Sunday from 9:30-4:00

The home of Fairview wines is a 300ha farm on the south-west-facing slopes of Paarl Mountain, a granite rock outcrop in the heart of the Paarl wine district, viticulturally among the most historic and influential areas of the Cape winelands. Standing among the lavender beds in the terraced front garden of the winery, you’ll look out across rolling fields and see distant flat-topped Table Mountain, a world-famous landmark standing guard over the city of Cape Town, South Africa’s tourist mecca perched on the Cape Peninsula at the southern tip of the African continent.

Winemaking on the farm can be traced back to 1699, not quite a half-century after the first European settlers arrived in southern Africa. But its wines entered the modern era with the first bottling under the Fairview label in 1974 by the Back family, owners since 1937. Today, some three decades later, grandson Charles Back II has brought Fairview wines to world markets. One of South Africa’s pre-eminent vintners, he has earned Fairview a reputation for consistent quality across a range of innovative styles, using both classic and unusual varieties. And he has helped pioneer a modern culture of wine growing in South Africa that embraces typicity of terroir, unrestricted by ‘estate’ appellation, by both developing his own vineyards to their full potential and seeking out new viticultural sites to grow fruit for wines to please popular tastes and discerning palates.

Charles Back’s philosophy is that wine is an integral and joyful part of everyday life. His unbridled enthusiasm, sense of fun and pure pleasure in growing vines, vinifying wine, and presenting it to wine lovers in all manner of exciting guises, pervades Fairview. You sense it when visiting. It’s a busy, happy, humming place. You get to taste and buy a vast array of different styles: from top-end, exclusive, often one-off bottlings through some fine Fairview standards to easy drinkers.

An old maturation cellar has been converted into a casual Mediterranean-styled indoor/outdoor eatery called The Goatshed. Included on the menu are Fairview’s own internationally award-winning farmstyle Jersey milk and goats’ milk cheeses. Fairview has a resident herd of 600 goats, some of whose members like to soak up the sun on the Goat Tower in front of the winery, as depicted on Fairview’s wine labels. Their antics have also been immortalised in the irreverently named, premium quality Goats do Roam range of wines.

Welcome to The Goats Do Roam Wine Company 
There’s no stopping Fairview owner/vintner Charles Back when his interest in a creative, entrepreneurial project is piqued. It all started with a suggestion by a wine buyer…  the man humorously suggested the vinification of a Rhône-style blend called “Goats do Roam”. Back, already known for his panache with Shiraz and always looking for new styles of wine to woo adventurous and discerning consumers, took the ball and ran with it.

Thus was born, in 1999, what was for the South African wine scene an innovative blend using Rhône varieties such as Shiraz, Cinsault, Carignan and Mourvèdre with a dash of local Pinotage, which Back had sourced from various vineyards (his own and others) around Paarl and Malmesbury. But, despite the humour of the packaging, the content of the bottle impressed with its quality, combining rich complexity with great drinkability. Since then, Goats do Roam has expanded into a fully fledged wine company with a range of nine whimsically named wines.
 
Since Cyril Back first brought milking goats to Fairview in 1980, the Fairview Vineyard Cheesery has continued to grow and develop. With the assistance of Michel Agostinelli, Fairview initially began producing goats milk cheese, courtesy of the resident Saanan goats. Today Fairview gourmet cheeses are market leaders, and the innovation of cheesemaker Louis Lourens and his team has kept the Vineyard Cheesery at the front of the pack.