Women are obviously an important sector of
the South African wine-buying market – the most important, according to one
executive in the retail liquor trade --- and the Groote Post estate on the Cape
west coast is therefore understandably delighted to have received an accolade
from the ladies.
Groote Post is near the town of Darling,
about an hour’s drive north of Cape Town. The farm is 300 years old, and Peter
and Nick Pentz have been making wine there for the past 15 years, successfully
too; they have earned a big reputation with their range of a dozen wines.
Their award-winning Groote Post Sauvignon
Blanc 2012 has now been voted the perfect wine for a “Girls’ Night Out”. This
was the choice of a hundred South African women of all backgrounds and tastes
who gathered recently at the Table Bay Hotel, Cape Town, to sip their way
through 200 wines and select their favourites for ten different social
occasions.
Nick Pentz says: “It gives us much pleasure
to know that this rainbow cross-section of sassy and adventurous wine-loving
ladies chose our Groote Post sauvignon blanc as their vinous date for a ladies’
night out”.
The wine is described by Groote Post’s
winemaker, Lukas Wentzel, as “an explosion of fruit driven by lime, gooseberry
and kiwi fruit, and underpinned by a thread of minerality”. It is available
nationally and retails at about R75 a bottle.
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There was no economising on wine when our
private tasting group met for a Christmas lunch at Al Firenze restaurant at La
Lucia. We opened the proceedings with two bottles of Laurent-Perrier Brut, one
of the most famous of French champagnes. Its retail price in Durban is about
R400 a bottle.
We followed with two whites and two
reds. The white wines came from the
Adoro cellar at Stellenbosch. The Adoro Sauvignon Blanc Three Regions 2009 is
made with grapes from Elgin (46 percent), Darling (34 percent) and Stellenbosch
(20 percent). The same cellar’s Naude White 2009, named after the winemaker,
Ian Naude, is a blend of semillon, sauvignon blanc and chenin blanc.
Both these wines are of high quality and
they retail at substantial prices, about R90 and R125 a bottle respectively.
For reds we had two of the Cape’s finest,
Thelema Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 and Waterford Cabernet Sauvignon 2003, both
from Stellenbosch, both big, subtle , memorable wines, as one would expect from
the prices, somewhere between R120 and R180 a bottle.
And the lunch itself? Some had grilled musselcracker, some had
octopus, some had veal. But this is an
Italian restaurant and two of us stuck to tradition with cannelloni and pizza,
and they were both excellent.
There were some designated drivers, taking
tiny sips. – Michael Green
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