MICHAEL GREEN’S WINE NOTES #222

Red wine tasting with a difference.

A red wine tasting with a difference was presented by Peter and Annette Hoyer when our private tasting group met at their home at La Lucia Ridge. Six wines were served, and each one was made from a different grape.

The tasting was blind - no glimpse of the labels - and obviously the objective was to try to identify one cultivar from another. Easy? No. Easy when you see the bottle, not so easy when all you see, taste and smell is the wine in the glass. I think one of our nine tasters got them all right. The rest of us floundered a bit.

It was an extravagant tasting. Five of the wines ranged in price from R157 a bottle to R90. The sixth was a modest R20.

Top marks, averaged out on our blind assessments, went to the Vergelegen Merlot 2005, from the celebrated and historic estate (near Somerset West) owned by Anglo American. This wine had a lovely dark colour, with fruit flavours and touches of chocolate on the palate, plus a long aftertaste. Price: R120.

Second, in our judgment, was the Bon Courage Inkara Shiraz 2003, from a distinguished estate at Robertson that was established nearly a century years ago (the homestead dates back to 1818). This was a rich, full wine (with an imposing 15 percent alcohol content), and it had the smoky, spicy character typical of shiraz. Price: about R100.

Three generations of the Bruwer family have lived and worked at Bon Courage, and the present winemaker, Jacques Bruwer, named this wine after his children, Inge, Karli and Andre, Inkara.

Next came the Kaapzicht Steytler Pinotage 2006, from an estate at Stellenbosch and named after the Steytler family, who have worked here for many years; Danie Steytler is the present cellarmaster and his brother, George Steytler, is the viticulturist. Another dense, rich wine, matured in oak barrels for nearly two years, flavours of berries and plums. This was a very superior kind of wine that showed what can be done with South Africa’s own grape, pinotage, and it is not unreasonably priced at about R90.

The scoring was very close, and there followed the Ilka Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 and the Meerlust Pinot Noir 2003. The Ilka cabernet comes from the Alluvia Winery which was established only seven years ago at Stellenbosch and which bottled its first wine in 2005. The cabernet turned out to be a complex and subtle wine, with rich plum flavours. Alluvia describes itself as a “boutique winery”, and boutique in my mental wine dictionary means expensive. This wine was R150 a bottle.

The word Ilka is another acroynym formed by family names. The winemaker, Delarey Brugman (who is a descendant of the famous Boer War general), has twin daughters named Ilse and Karla.

The pinot noir from Meerlust, one of the Cape’s most famous estates, was a very fine example of this cultivar, which is not much grown in South Africa (less than 1 percent of all the planted vines) and is much prized by connoisseurs. It is a difficult grape to grow and vinify, away from its home in France, Burgundy, and the Western Cape products are uniformly expensive. This pinot noir had a wide range of tastes and scents: fruit, tobacco, cherries, violets, smokiness. A beautiful and subtle wine. Price: R157.

Predictably enough, last place in our scoring went to the R20 wine, Robertson Ruby Cabernet 2008, from the well-known winery which is owned by a co-operative of 43 members. Ruby cabernet, a cross between the cabernet sauvignon and carignan grapes, was developed in California as a vine that could withstand hot weather. It is a prolific producer of grapes and the wines made from them are as a result generally inexpensive. The wine itself usually has a slightly sweetish tinge but a very pleasant (in my view), full, and sometimes rich character.

This Robertson wine was a good example, and you can buy it at about R20 a bottle. It scored reasonably well, very well if you consider the price. As one of our tasters observed, it was not the greatest wine served at our gathering, but it was probably the best value – Michael Green