Wines of the New South Africa. Tim James
Noir combined with Cinsaut’s prolific ease and tolerance of hot days. But strange things emerge in such processes, of course—who would have imagined, for example, that two grapes that tended to produce light-colored wines would merge to produce a grape giving deep color? As to the elegance and finesse characteristic of good Pinot Noir, few would claim that these number among Pinotage’s virtues, although there certainly are some more lightly made Pinotages with a perfume and grace that recall this side of the grape’s origins, and after the best versions have been ten years or so in bottle, its noble ancestry seems by no means implausible. Many have aged well: tasted in 2010, the Lanzerac 1963 was splendid, lively and fresh with not too much grip and deep, lingering fruit. More recent wines than that, notably Kanonkops, have also shown the ability to mature beneficially over a decade or more.
The problems? There are indeed a few, though it must be stressed that as viticulturists and especially winemakers have learned to deal with the grape these are encountered increasingly rarely. Judicious winemaking reduces to a whisper the sweet acetone pungency (deriving from isoamyl acetate), and the trace—or more—of bitterness that emerged in the 1990s particularly is now rarer, and often even attractive when at a very low level. Pinotage is prone to deliver big tannins, a characteristic exacerbated by the overoaking inflicted by some ambitious winemakers. In fact, there is perhaps more ambition around than a lot of Pinotage can take, and too much patriotic anxiety also, as well as “cultural cringe.” Without at all decrying the very good Pinotage wines made by a number of producers (apart from the few already mentioned here, one should add at least Beyerskloof, Grangehurst, Simonsig, and L’Avenir), the great virtues of less-grand wines should be mentioned: lightly wooded, sufficiently ripe, delicious examples like the standard Beyerskloof, now made for an international audience in huge volumes.
Using Pinotage in blends has been a less purist track to the goal of a South African style of wine that will be both unique and compelling. The idea of a “Cape blend” has had some success among eager producers at least, so that the phrase appears on a number of labels at all price levels. The minimum percentage needed for a wine to be considered a Cape blend is a matter of some debate even among the advocates of the idea, and any regulation around the matter is a long way off—not least because there are a number of producers who dislike the idea of one recipe arrogating to itself a name that implies such authority.
In fact, Pinotage frequently works happily with other varieties. The first wine to make a declared virtue of blending it with other grapes was Welgemeend Amadé in 1979, which also included Grenache and Syrah to make an indigenous equivalent of the southern Rhône blend. There was no general enthusiasm for the idea until the first half of the 1990s, when Uiterwyk (now DeWaal) introduced its Estate wine, which took on the Cape blend moniker from 1994; a number of other wineries subsequently took up the idea. Generally both Bordeaux and Rhône varieties feature in such blends. Pinotage tends, in fact, to be the minority component, partly because it tends to dominate. This dominance typically becomes much less pronounced after a few years in bottle—a maturation that is well deserved, as some of these wines have shown (Beyerskloof Synergy, Clos Malverne Auret, DeWaal, Grangehurst, and Kaapzicht among them). In terms of style, as with varietal Pinotage, the blends range from the comparatively restrained to the large, powerful, and lush; from modest, scarcely oaked, graceful wines to august, ambitious wines matured in all-new French oak.
Pinotage also makes a good rosé and does occasional service in other styles of wine, from sparkling to fortified. But the big success story for the “national grape” in recent years, locally and increasingly internationally, has been so-called “coffee Pinotage.” Pioneered at Diemersfontein in the early 2000s by its then-winemaker, Bertus Fourie, it basically implies a wine fermented on highly toasted oak staves to give a strong mocha character. There are now numerous big-brand examples—somewhat to the horror of Pinotage’s true believers.
Pinot Noir
This famously difficult variety has a short history of real success in the Cape, but has made great, even exciting progress during this century. Plantings are growing but still small, just over 1 percent of the total, and by far the larger part of the Pinot harvest goes into sparkling wine. The number of genuinely good examples of varietal Pinot can be counted on a pair of hands, but the number is growing, and what’s more, from varied geographical origins.
Pinot was probably imported by Perold in the second decade of the twentieth century; in his Treatise on Viticulture of 1927 he describes it as producing on the university farm “a wine of high quality . . . beautifully coloured, strong, full-bodied wine with an excellent bouquet.” Some Pinot seems to have found its way in 1920 to a very short-lived career at Alto (it ripened too early to be easily suitable for blended wine), but it found a warmer welcome at Muratie later in the twenties. For many decades, Muratie’s was the only South African example. Perold’s interest in the variety at the time was also marked by his crossing it with Cinsaut to produce Pinotage.
The prelude to the modern era of Pinot in South Africa came in the late 1970s, when a number of more ambitious producers planted it and attempted to make a good wine from it—foolhardy and obsessed producers, perhaps, since the prevailing wisdom was that the grape could not successfully transplant from Burgundy. At their inspirational head was Tim Hamilton-Russell and his winemaker, Peter Finlayson, in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley. The problem that eventually became apparent was that the approved clone was a Swiss one, BK5, developed for sparkling wine. Finlayson soon moved on to another little bit of Burgundy in the valley, and his first Pinot, of 1991, was made from grapes grown in Elgin, where better clonal material had been experimentally planted in the early 1980s. It was immediately apparent to many commentators that this superior clonal material was the only way forward. All significant producers of Pinot with experience in Burgundy have by now replanted to a handful of Burgundian clones.
The Hemel-en-Aarde region and Elgin remain the joint headquarters, as it were, of Pinot production, with a number of good new producers joining the old guard—Newton Johnson, Sumaridge, and Crystallum among them in Hemel-en-Aarde, and Oak Valley (the original supplier to Bouchard Finlayson), Catherine Marshall, and Paul Cluver in Elgin. There are also fine examples emerging from other coolish areas, such as the higher slopes of Franschhoek, where clever work in the Chamonix vineyards has led to a dramatic upcurve in quality. And in the cool heights of the Outeniqua Mountains, Herold is showing what can be done with Pinot in the most surprising places, as is Fryer’s Cove up the West Coast. Pinot is among the varieties being experimented with in Super Single’s high-lying and continental vineyards of Sutherland-Karoo. A few decent examples are made in warmer Stellenbosch, notably Meerlust’s.
The growing sophistication of winemakers and viticulturists, well traveled and acquainted with Pinots not only of Burgundy but also of New Zealand and Oregon, is no doubt as significant a factor in quality improvements as is the improvement in clonal material and virus-cleaned vines. Viticultural methods remain varied—Bouchard Finlayson, for example, used high-density planting and Burgundian-style trellising from the outset, but many others adopt more standard South African practices with success. Overuse of new oak remains something of a temptation for some in the cellar, as does an affection for very ripe fruit and consequent high alcohols, and a reliance on extracted tannin rather than acidity for structure; but if these are faults (and they are not so for everyone), they tend to be minor ones these days. Despite the excitement of what is happening with the fickle grape, there is little doubt but that Pinot Noir will always occupy a tiny niche in the edifice of Cape wine, given the dearth of suitably cool locations with enough water for supplementary irrigation.
WHITE WINE VARIETIES
CHARDONNAY
When ambitious estate winemakers in the 1970s turned to Chardonnay, they found only the badly virused and diseased clones at the Stellenbosch University collection. Danie de Wet of De Wetshof in Robertson was one of the pioneers of the variety (he produced the one Chardonnay listed in the 1980 edition of the annual Platter Guide), and he says, “From day one we knew that we must get better material.” Unfortunately, as described in chapter 2, illegal imports seemed the only way to do this in a reasonable space of time—and unfortunately, too, much of what was brought in proved to be Auxerrois. But better planting material did become available during the 1980s; plantings grew from