MICHAEL GREEN’S WINE NOTES #243

Peter Hoyer, who is well-known in the liquor industry, had a novel idea when he and his wife Annette held a wine tasting at their home recently for our private tasting group. Six red wines with widely varying characteristics were presented. As usual, the tasting was blind; we were not told until afterwards which was which. And as usual we were given descriptions of the wines as clues. The unusual angle was that, instead of turning to learned references by lofty wine writers, Peter simply took the descriptions from the labels of the bottles with, I think, a little help from the producers’ websites

Broadly the six wines represented the following features: chocolate, coffee, pepper, berry, meaty and, wait for it, sexy. A little fanciful, perhaps, especially the last, but we had a lot of fun trying to sort them out. It was not easy. I have the theory that wines of high quality are more difficult to identify that than those that are more rough and ready, and the Hoyers’ six were all of high quality.

The most expensive wine on the list was one called The Chocolate Block, made by the Boekenhoutskloof Winery at Franschhoek. The name is self-explanatory, and the wine was described as having spicy notes supported by ripe plum, black fruit and violet aromas and --- chocolate. It is a blend of shiraz (69 percent), cabernet sauvignon, grenache noir, cinsaut and viognier. We found the 2008 vintage excellent, with a dark colour, a rich bouquet and complex flavours. It sells at R160 a bottle, and I suppose it is to our credit that it was given top place, on an average of the marks, in our blind tasting.

Second in our scoring was The Berry Box, a wine made David Finlayson at his Edgebaston cellar at Stellenbosch. This is another multiple blend:shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, petit verdot and merlot. The vintage was 2008 and the wine showed lovely full flavours that could develop even further with another couple of years of maturation. Interestingly enough, this wine has a screwcap, a closure being used more and more often for top-grade wines. The price is R60. Rather good value, I would say.

Third place was occupied by one of the “coffee wines” that have become popular in the past year or so. This was Boland Kelder’s Cappupinoccinatage, an impossible name really, like “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”. As the name suggests, it is a pinotage with mocha, coffee flavours, a 2009 vintage. Very attractive, and a big wine.
At a price of R47 it is, like most Boland Kelder wines, good value. Boland Kelder is at Paarl; kelder of course means cellar. It was established in 1947 and used to be called Boland Co-op. Today it has 96 wine farmer shareholders.

Perhaps our tasters weren’t in the mood, but they gave only fourth place to The Very Sexy Shiraz (yes, that’s its name) from the Cloof winery at Darling. I personally gave it first place on my scoresheet but I was defeated by my more reserved colleagues. The wine is apparently advertised as being Darling of origin, darling by nature. Whoever wrote the description seems to have been quite carried away: “Grown in vineyards that have been described as a shiraz heaven, the wine’s luscious fruit was accessorised with French oak, making a package so appealing and seductive that it could only be named after the experience one has when drinking it”. And all this for R60 a bottle.

The other wines tasted were Rib Shack Red 2008, from Douglas Green, a pinotage/shiraz blend described as being “meaty, just like a succulent steak or smokey rack of ribs”, R45; and another Edgebaston product, The Pepper Pot, a blend of shiraz, mourvedre and tannat grapes, with tastes and smells of black pepper, spice and red berry, price R60. – Michael Green