Our Story — The Family
One farm, one family
Kanonkop has been in the same family for four generations — an unbroken line from statesman JW Sauer to today's custodians.
The Founder's Vision
Paul Sauer
He inherited bare ground and left behind a First Growth. In 1929, when the family farm up the road was sold, Paul Sauer's mother kept back the lower land — virgin veld with no buildings and no vines — and gave it to her only son.
He was elected to Parliament that same year, and for the rest of his life he straddled the two worlds he loved: politics and farming. Forty-one unbroken years in the House earned him the title of the “Prince” of South African politics; every spare penny went back into the farm. He built an underground tasting room here, and approached his own wines, his daughter remembered, the way someone approaches a church service — hat off, glass raised in silence.
For all that, he had no patience with wine snobbery. “Decide for yourself what a good wine tastes like,” he said. “For you, the best wine is the wine that tastes the best.” He died in January 1976, three years after the first bottle carried his farm's name.
In 1981 the estate honoured him with the Bordeaux-style blend that carries his name — today one of the most decorated wines in the Southern Hemisphere.
The wine that bears his nameFamily Lineage
Four generations on the Simonsberg
From the Sauer era to the Krige custodianship — the same family, the same granite slopes, the same uncompromising red wines.
The wine runs a long way back. Paul Sauer's mother was a Cloete of Groot Constantia, descended from the farmers who made the sweet Constantia wine that was the toast of the courts of Europe. Her son took that inheritance to a bare hillside on the Simonsberg and started again from nothing.
Kanonkop passed from Paul Sauer to his daughter Mary and her husband Jannie Krige, and from them to their sons. The cannon on the hillock above gave the farm its name; four generations of one family gave it its character.
Fourth-Generation Custodians
The Krige Brothers
Brothers Johann and Paul Krige steward the farm today — and still host our famous snoek braai at the Paul Sauer Cellar themselves.
The single decision that made Kanonkop what it is was theirs. In the early 1980s the farm was still growing a little of everything — Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin, Riesling, Pinot Noir. One Saturday the family sat down together and agreed to stop. Out came the white varieties, including a Riesling that had just been awarded Superior status, and the farm committed itself to Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinotage alone. “The call was made simply as a result of the terroir,” Johann says. Everything since has followed from it.
The same conviction shows in what never reached you. When a fault was found in the 1996 Pinotage, the whole vintage was withheld — and when cork taint was found in a Kadette already on shelves at home and abroad, every bottle was recalled. Both hurt. Neither was in question.
“The farm was always, and still is, a place where a worker gets the sense that they are looked after.” Profit-sharing reaches every member of the sixty-strong team. “We are not just selling wine,” says Johann. “We are selling a lifestyle. This is ours, and everybody is welcome.”
Join the snoek braaiThe Next Generation
The story continues
A fifth generation is growing up between these vines — the great-great-grandchildren of the man who was handed a bare hillside in 1929. One of them carries his name: Paul Krige's son is named Sauer.
Both brothers live a stone's throw from the cellar door, and family gatherings here look much as they always have — long wooden tables under the oaks, snoek on the coals, the dogs underfoot, and children growing up understanding that a harvest is something the whole farm does together. “Everybody understands how our destinies are linked on this farm,” says Johann, “whether you are a tractor driver or a marketing director.”
What Paul Sauer began with two wooden shipping crates for an office is now in its fourth generation of family hands, and its fifth is already at the table.