MICHAEL GREEN’S WINE NOTES #236

Remarkable staying power of some of the old wines of the Cape.

Generally speaking, South African wines are not made to be kept in cellars for decades of maturation. Nevertheless, some of the old wines of the Cape have remarkable staying power.

I recently had the opportunity of opening and drinking two real veterans, both with famous names. One was a half-bottle (375 ml.) of Nederburg Selected Cabernet, 1969 vintage, given to me by an old friend, Elio Pikholz, who divides his time between Cape Town and New Zealand.

It was a rare experience, tasting a wine that was 40 years old. In those days the Nederburg label said simply “cabernet”, not cabernet sauvignon. Other types of this grape, cabernet franc and ruby cabernet, had not yet really appeared on the Cape wine scene. But the explanation given lower on the label was more specific, saying that the wine was “produced from the noble, shy-bearing cabernet sauvignon which permeates its wines with a full, rich, nutty flavour and noble dignity. Only the prize-winning Cum Laude vats are treasured for Selected Cabernet”. The label was printed in English, Afrikaans and French. The vintage date was given but not the alcohol content of the wine, as is now required by law.

Predictably, there were some problems in opening the wine. Most of the cork came out with careful leverage of a broad-screw corkscrew, but some cork crumbled into the bottle. I filtered the wine using a funnel and a coffee filter paper, a rather slow process. You need patience. The cork had no bad smell and the wine was not “corked” or “corky”, as happens rather rarely when a cork has become rotten.

The colour of the wine was a good deep red, but with the brownish tinge often found in these old vintages. The aroma seemed to me to be somewhat muted but otherwise OK. The taste was surprisingly good, fruity, not vinegary, very slightly musty, but an entirely acceptable flavour. It carried a kind of nostalgic reminder that this was once a premium wine.

I have no idea what this cost in the 1970’s, when the 1969 vintage would have been on the bottle-store shelves. At last year’s Nederburg wine auction the Nederburg Selected Cabernet of 1962 fetched R26,000 for a case of six 750 ml bottles, about R4,300 a bottle, but this wine had been specially stored and preserved by Nederburg. Its equivalent today, Nederburg cabernet sauvignon, 2008 vintage, is about R55 a bottle and very good value.

The second old wine which I sampled was a 1986 Meerlust Rubicon contributed by another old friend, Julian Coetzee of Cape Town.

Meerlust, at Stellenbosch, is one of the Cape’s most famous estates, established in 1693 and bottling wine in the modern era since 1975. And Rubicon, a blend of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and cabernet franc, the Bordeaux blend, is one of the Cape’s most famous wines. It has been produced by this estate since 1980, thirty years ago.

Meerlust means pleasure by the sea (the farm is not too far from the False Bay coast). I don’t know why Nico Myburgh, then owner of the estate (and father of the present owner, Hannes Myburgh), decided to call his top wine Rubicon, which was, of course, the stream crossed by Julius Caesar when he decided to seize power in Rome two thousand years ago. “Crossing the Rubicon” has come to mean making an irrevocable decision. Perhaps Nico Myburgh was subconsciously anticipating the Rubicon speech made by the then president of South Africa, P.W. Botha, five years later, in 1985, in which he promised all sorts of political reforms. The speech, unlike the wine, was a flop.

The Rubicon which we tasted came from a particularly good vintage, 1986, and the wine was described at the time as having cedar/vanilla notes on the bouquet and blackcurrant fruit on the palate, with tannins for longevity. Extracting the cork posed no particular problem. The wine still showed a distinguished character, very acceptable, though there had probably been some decline in quality over the past 24 years. Nevertheless, I felt that this was still a very good wine that one could serve anywhere.

Meerlust Rubicon has, I think, never been rated at less than four and a half stars (out of five) in the annual Platter’s wine guide. I don’t know what it cost about 20 years ago, when the 1986 vintage would have been on the market, but the current vintage, 2005, is about R250 a bottle.

Both the old wines which we tasted had been stored over the years in cool, well-ventilated rooms without too much variation in temperature, but they were not kept in the air-conditioned cellars that are used by many commercial concerns for wine maturation. Both wines were testimony to the skills of the people who made them, Gunter Brozel at Nederburg and Nico Myburgh at Meerlust. – Michael Green