Wine Just Got a New Grape | Meet Sémillon Gris

Every so often the wine world does something that sounds enormous and turns out to be even better than it sounds. This is one of those. The OIV, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine, which is essentially the United Nations of grapes and keeps the official register of every variety on earth, has just added a new one. It’s called Sémillon Gris, and it has been recognised as a distinct variety with South Africa as its country of origin. That makes it, on paper, the world’s newest grape. Which is funny, because it’s at least a couple of hundred years old, and for a good chunk of the nineteenth century it was probably the most planted grape in the entire country. Wine, as ever, took its time.

I’ll keep this accessible, because you don’t need to know anything about viticulture to enjoy the story. All you need to know is that grapes, like people, occasionally have children who don’t look like them; that South Africa has been quietly growing one of those children for three centuries without officially noticing; and that a couple of winemakers in the Swartland just spent more than a decade proving it deserved a birth certificate. Here’s what happened, why it matters, and what the stuff actually tastes like.

Let’s start with the word. In wine, gris means grey, and it describes a grape whose skin has gone pinkish-grey instead of green, or blue-black. You already know one: Pinot Gris (the Italians call it Pinot Grigio) is a grey-skinned mutation of Pinot Noir. Grape vines do this. Every so often a bud mutates, the skin colour changes, and if somebody takes a cutting from that vine, you get a new lineage. Whether it counts as a whole new variety, though, is a matter for the botanists and the bureaucrats, and for a long time the answer for Sémillon Gris was: no, it’s just Sémillon with a suntan. Grown together, picked together, pressed together, nobody bothered to separate it.

What the OIV listing does is settle that argument. After more than a decade of selection, propagation and certification, Sémillon Gris is now on the International List of Vine Varieties as a variety in its own right, with South Africa named as where it comes from. That is not a rebranding. It’s the difference between a nickname and a name on a passport, and it has practical consequences I’ll get to. But first, the history, because it’s wonderful.

Sémillon has been in the Cape since the very beginning of its winemaking story; it’s thought to have arrived with Jan van Riebeeck in the 1650s, then spread with the French Huguenots. It was so common that nobody used its French name. They just called it groendruif, “green grape.” And I mean common: by 1822, according to Decanter’s account of the variety, Sémillon made up 93% of the Cape’s vineyards, having grown from about a million vines in 1795 to 22 million. Somewhere along the way, a pink-skinned version appeared and thrived in the Cape’s heat, and the locals, being practical, called that one rooi groendruif, the “red green grape,” which is a name I find genuinely delightful. By the mid-1800s, by some estimates, half the country’s Sémillon had mutated to gris. The two were interplanted, harvested together and crushed together as one wine. Nobody thought of them as different. Why would you? It was all groendruif.

Then the twentieth century happened to it. Phylloxera, the vine-killing louse that devastated the world’s vineyards, tore through the Cape in the 1880s. What was replanted was, increasingly, something else. Chenin Blanc rose, the KWV quota system of the 1950s steered growers towards volume, and the grape that had been “the grape” dwindled to a footnote. By 1979, Sémillon was 3.4% of the national vineyard, and the gris wasn’t even recorded. It survived, if it survived at all, in scattered old bush-vine blocks, pockets of century-old vines that nobody had got round to ripping out, sitting there being red one year and green the next, waiting for someone to notice.

Here’s my favourite detail, and it explains why this took so long. Sémillon Gris doesn’t stay put. Rosa Kruger, the viticulturist who did more than anyone to protect South Africa’s old vines, thought she was losing her mind when she first tried to track it. “I started marking the mutated red vines while taking cuttings,” she told Decanter. “The following year the bunches on the vine would be green again. I thought I was making a mistake, but after a couple of years I realised that Sémillon Gris can actually mutate back to Blanc.” Bunches hanging on gnarled bushvines like Christmas baubles, red one year, green the next. It’s a shapeshifter. Which is precisely why establishing it as a stable, distinct variety, one you can propagate reliably and put on a label, required a decade of patient selection rather than a quick DNA test. You have to find the vines that stay gris, prove they stay gris, and grow them on until you’re certain.

That patience belongs mostly to Andrea and Chris Mullineux, of Mullineux & Leeu Family Wines in the Swartland, working with their partner Analjit Singh. Over more than ten years they selected, propagated and certified the vines, and the result sits on their Roundstone estate on the Riebeeksrivier slopes: the world’s first certified Sémillon Gris vineyard, a mother block of almost a hectare of vines trained the old way, each to its own post. A mother block is the foundation stock; it’s where the certified, disease-free cuttings for every future vineyard come from, distributed to growers and researchers through the industry body Vititec. “This journey has been about preserving a living piece of world wine history,” Andrea Mullineux says. “Sémillon Gris is part of the Cape’s viticultural DNA.” I like that she calls it preserving rather than inventing. Nobody made this grape. Somebody finally wrote it down.

This is the bit that sounds like paperwork and is really about what ends up in your glass. Until now, a grower with Sémillon Gris had a problem: officially it didn’t exist, so there was no certified plant material to buy, and you couldn’t straightforwardly put the words on a label. The OIV listing fixes both. There is now a legitimate, certified source of vines, so anyone in South Africa, or anywhere else, can plant it properly, and the wines can be sold as what they are. That matters commercially, but it matters more culturally. The Cape has spent twenty years rediscovering its old-vine heritage, the ancient Chenin and Cinsault and Sémillon bush vines that survived the quota years, and this is the first time that movement has produced not just a great wine but a formally recognised grape. South Africa now has a variety the rest of the world can only get from South Africa. In an industry obsessed with the same twenty French grapes planted everywhere, that’s a genuine point of difference, and the sort of story younger drinkers, as I keep saying in pieces like the one about wine lists, actually respond to.

Good news: unlike a certain 88-year-old whisky I wrote about this week, you can actually drink this. Sémillon Gris makes textured, waxy, quietly honeyed whites, often with a faint blush of colour from the skins, more grip and weight than a standard Sémillon, and a savoury, almost salty edge from those old Swartland vines. It’s a food wine, and a wine that ages; the Boekenhoutskloof winemaker Gottfried Mocke has argued that mature Cape Sémillons are among the most gastronomically interesting wines the country makes, and the gris is a big part of why. If you like textural whites, skin-contact styles, or the orange wine end of things, you’ll be at home here. Where to start: Mullineux is the obvious name, as the people who did the work, and their old-vine Sémillon blends have long leaned on gris. Look also for Thorne & Daughters, Damascene (Jean Smit, ex-Boekenhoutskloof, sourcing from exceptional old sites), and the Swartland producers generally. Expect the word “Sémillon Gris” to start appearing on labels in its own right over the next few vintages, now that it legally can. Prices sit in the serious-but-sane bracket, well below Burgundy money, which, given how rare a true new grape is, feels like genuine value.

What is Sémillon Gris?

A pink-skinned natural mutation of Sémillon Blanc that arose in South African vineyards, historically called rooi groendruif (“red green grape”). In 2026 the OIV listed it as a distinct grape variety with South Africa as its country of origin.

Is Sémillon Gris really a new grape?

It’s newly recognised, not newly created. It has grown in the Cape for around two centuries and once made up a large share of the country’s vineyards, but until now it was treated as a form of Sémillon rather than a variety in its own right.

Who is responsible for its recognition?

Andrea and Chris Mullineux of Mullineux & Leeu Family Wines, with partner Analjit Singh, led more than a decade of selection, propagation and certification, establishing the first certified Sémillon Gris mother block at Roundstone in the Swartland.

What does Sémillon Gris taste like?

Textured, waxy, honeyed whites with a faint blush of colour, more weight and grip than standard Sémillon, a savoury edge from old vines, and real ageing potential. A food-friendly white for fans of textural and skin-contact styles.

Where can I buy Sémillon Gris?

Look to Swartland producers, especially Mullineux, plus Thorne & Daughters and Damascene. Expect more wines to carry the name on the label over coming vintages now that it is officially recognised.

What is the OIV?

The International Organisation of Vine and Wine, the intergovernmental body that sets international standards for wine and maintains the official register of grape varieties.

BY VIM, EDITOR OF 12×75. Sources include Decanter, Wineland and the producers involved; correct as of 6 September 2026. Please drink responsibly.