MICHAEL GREEN’S WINE NOTES #241

Pinotage now achieved respectability and distinction.

Pinotage, the red wine that was for long the Cinderella of the South African wine industry, has come into its own in the past decade or so.

This wine, once scorned as being too bitter or too sweet and smelling of nail-polish and paint, now appears in about 350 different bottles in South Africa, and it accounts for about 6% of the total area of the country’s vineyards. It is also produced in Brazil, Israel, New Zealand and the United States.

It is of course the one truly South African wine. It was developed in 1925 by Professor Abraham Isak Perold of Stellenbosch University, who produced a cross of the pinot noir grape from Burgundy and the hermitage (now called cinsaut) grape from the Rhone valley.

It was a long time before the new idea took hold. Pinotage was produced in barrels in the 1940’s, but the first bottled pinotage came on to the market in 1959, and it bore the label of the Lanzerac estate at Stellenbosch, which still produces a high quality pinotage, aptly called Pionier.

The pinotages of 30 years ago were often rather rough and rural, but today this wine has achieved respectability and distinction. Typical flavours and aromas are plum, dark chocolate, coffee, prunes, fruit cake, toffee, cherry. The wine is generally full-bodied (about 14% alcohol) and it is usually good value, selling at prices below those charged for cabernet sauvignon, merlot and shiraz.

Our private tasting group met recently at the home of Vanda Davies and Dennis Banks, and they served us nine pinotages, a formidably long list, but we were able to fight off the palate fatigue, at least until we had completed our scoring. The scoring of the eight tasters was generally high. Average scores out of 20 ranged from 18,1 to 15,3 (the maximum score categories were the usual three for colour, seven for nose and ten for palate). And the tasting was of course blind; we were given a list and descriptions of the wines but we didn’t know which was which.

The top mark went to the Beyerskloof pinotage of 2008, a wine that is given three and a half stars in the latest Platter wine guide. The wine comes from the Beyerskloof estate at Stellenbosch, where the co-owner and cellarmaster is, predictably enough, Beyers Truter. A splendid, oak-matured wine, dark colour, quite intense, with a touch of strawberry flavour. It sells at about R47 a bottle.

Second in our placing was the interesting Barista pinotage 2009. This is designed to be a “coffee pinotage”, barista being the Italian term for an expert coffee-blender. The wine does have strong coffee and chocolate tastes and aromas, plus berries and plums. Price: about R51.

Three pinotages from the Long Mountain wine company at Stellenbosch featured well on the score-card. These were the 2010 vintage, more coffee and plum flavours here; the 2006 vintage, plums and raspberry; and the 2007 Long Mountain Reserve Pinotage, berry and chocolate flavours and an imposing 14,68 percent alcohol. These wines are very good value, just under R40, except for the Reserve, which sells for about R58.

From the same cellar came the wild card of the tasting, the only non-pinotage, the Long Mountain Reserve Shiraz of 2007, smoky, blackberry and pepper aromas, tastes of cherry, chocolate and vanilla. Very easy to identify of course, but I’m not sure whether anybody did. Not so easy, with nine glasses of wine confronting you. Price of this wine: about R58.

The other wines tasted were the Nederburg Winemaster’s Reserve pinotage of 2008, from one of the Cape’s biggest and best wine producers, plums and prunes with a hint of liquorice, R58; Spier pinotage 2009, from the well-known Stellenbosch estate, black cherry, mocha, R49; and KWV Lifestyle Pinotage 2008, from the famous cellar at Paarl which was established nearly a hundred years ago, plum, fruit cake, toffee, about R60. – Michael Green