David Clarke of the agency Ex Animo Wine Co. provides a podcast consisting of a series of interviews with industry figures, a recent subject being Niels Verburg of Luddite in Bot River. Listen to it here.
According to Google Analytics, we had 42 288 users in May, an increase of 79% year on year, and our best month ever for traffic. We are proud of this given the generally tough trading conditions for media – we were saddened to note that both Associated Media Publishing, owners of Cosmopolitan, House & Leisure and Good Housekeeping and the magazine division of Caxton, home to such titles as Country Life and Food & Home recently shut down.
At the end of last year, we began a reader funding drive to cover some of our costs and continue to provide coverage of an industry we all care deeply about. We suggested an amount of R600 a year or R50 a month per individual with a view to achieving a total audience contribution of R300 000 per annum. To date, we’ve had some 140 people pledge their support. We are most appreciative, but we still have a long way to go to reach our above-mentioned target by the end of 2020.
To contribute, click here.
Carinus Family Vineyards is a partnership between Danie and Hugo Carinus, two top growers with vineyards in both Stellenbosch and Swartland, there two “reserve” examples of Chenin Blanc rapidly becoming mut-haves for aficionados of the variety.
Rad.
Carinus Polkadraai Heuwels 2019
Price: R280
As made by Chris Alheit from Stellenbosch grapes. Fermented predominantly in concrete eggs but also a small portion of old oak. The nose shows pear, white peach, citrus and green apple plus some leesy complexity. The palate is super-concentrated and super-fresh, the acidity possessing an invigorating sourness while the finish is long and intensely savoury. Extraordinarily youthful and tight at this stage.
CE’s rating: 95/100.
Carinus Rooidraai 2019
Price: R350
As made by Lukas van Loggerenberg from Swartland grapes. Fermented and matured in oak, including a 25% component of first-fill. Yellow fruit, earth and some waxiness plus hints of vanilla and spice. A little rounder and broader than its counterpart above – very flavourful with nicely integrated acidity.
CE’s rating: 93/100.
Check out our South African wine ratings database.
Attention: Reviews like this take time and effort to create. We need your support to make our work possible. To make a financial contribution, click here. Invoice available upon request – contact info@winemag.co.za
It’s an issue that is never too far from the official wine lover’s list of gripes. Now, according to a recent interesting article on wine-searcher.com, the European Union is moving closer to requiring wine to list its ingredients, like food already must – something which would presumably also apply to imports from other countries. Though whether the list would have to be on the bottle itself, or available via, say, a QR code, seems uncertain as yet. Expect enthusiastic support for the idea from the new-wave minimalists and “natural wine” producers, and huffy opposition from most of the bulk producers as well as, for example, those grand cool-climate wine producers who like chaptalizing their pinot and chardonnay while sneering at warm-country winemakers who add acid. (But does added sugar that’s transmuted into alcohol count as an additive? More on that below.)
To my knowledge, there’s only one local wine with what purports to be a list of ingredients on its label: Testalonga El Bandito, the skin contact version. The list is short: “Made with grapes”, the label declares, as it always has done.
In a sense, that declaration, implying that nothing else went into the wine, can be seen as a challenge to other wines to make an equivalent statement. Wine still benefits, I think, from its image of unprocessed naturalness, as the simple product of harmonious agriculture – certainly compared with many “industrial” products, whose manipulation is taken for granted. But in many cases it’s far from the truth, as would be witnessed by labels which contained an honest and complete list of additives. And that list is potentially long – and differing somewhat between jurisdictions. Permitted additives in South Africa number (by my recent count) 68, from acacia/arabic gum to yeast mannoproteins, via such commonalities as tartaric acid, sulphur and enzymes and such ad hoc rarities as gold flakes. Some are permitted only for specific types of wines.
You’d think that it would be a comparatively simple matter to legislate about (always leaving aside the question of honest compliance and the role of tests). It’s by no means clear just how many wine drinkers actually care what’s in their wine, any more than most people care greatly, or know, what’s in their food (I opened my fridge and looked at the stuff there, and I couldn’t begin to guess what additives were in in – it’s all listed, though: a packet of bacon contained, apart from pork, water, salt, various phosphates, sugar, sodium erythorbate, curing agents and sodium nitrate; I had no idea). But many do care, as I blushingly agree we all should, and they would surely expect use of any of the permitted additives to be listed.
Trouble is, not all of those additives exist in the finished wine – some of them temporarily assist processes. Add sulphur or tartaric acid, and it remains in the wine; but things like fining agents are removed once they have done their jobs. I asked Rudiger Gretschel, Vinimark’s production director and someone extremely sussed about the chemistry of wine, and he confirmed this, adding that it is a very difficult subject, with a lot of grey areas. As he said, a vegan buying a wine labelled as vegan would be concerned if gelatine had been used as a fining agent, however completely it had disappeared from the final product.
And that sugar added to your splendid burgundy to enrich it, raising its alcohol level – additive or not? Wood essence yes, wooden barrels no, woodchips maybe? Concentrated grape must to add some sweetness to a co-op wine in South Africa – additive or not? Some of these things are very tricky to rule on (and it seems that the sugar question in relation to the proposed labelling regulations is one area of argument). Europe already categorises substances allowed for wine production as either additives or processing aids.
A case could certainly be made that genuine transparency would require notification of all “unnatural” processes (including mechanical ones like reverse osmosis) or additives. I suspect that is never going to happen, and probably never could, given that auditing methods are nowhere adequate to check up on substances that can’t be detected by analysing the wine in the bottle; unless the producer declared that gelatine had been used, how could a concerned vegan ever know?
But it does look possible that what the law discriminates as additives rather than aids to processing will soon need to be listed. And if South Africa’s major wine market prescribes, could we be far behind?
Attention: Articles like this take time and effort to create. We need your support to make our work possible. To make a financial contribution, click here. Invoice available upon request – contact info@winemag.co.za
Entries for the ninth annual Cabernet Sauvignon Report sponsored by multinational financial services company Prescient are now open.
winemag.co.za will be generating a number of category reports throughout the year – see here. Each report will be based on the outcome of a blind tasting of wines entered. Upon the release of a report, a top 10 will be announced and the year will culminate in a gala event when the individual best wine in each category will be revealed. These top-performing wines will subsequently be shown at tastings in both Johannesburg and London.
Wines will be tasted by a three-person panel consisting of Christian Eedes as chairman as well as Roland Peens and James Pietersen, both of Wine Cellar, Cape Town merchants and cellarers of fine wine.
This year’s tasting for the Prescient Cabernet Sauvignon Report will also form the basis of a report to appear in the September issue of Decanter.
Entries are now closed. The report will be released on 30 June.
An entry fee of R950 including VAT per wine applies and you will be directed to our online shop to make payment after you have completed the entry form below. Please note that if you want to enter multiple wines, each will require a separate form although payment can be made all at once.
The Institute of Cape Wine Masters has announced that four new Cape Wine Masters have graduated from the Cape Wine Academy, bringing the number to attain this qualification in the 41-year history of the educational body to 106.
The four new CWMs and their dissertations are:
Karen Bloom, a wine lover from Durban – The Rise of Prosecco
Wanda Cronje of Fun with Food from Durbanville – Ovoid and Alternative Wine Vessels in South Africa
Boela Gerber, winemaker of Groot Constantia – Understanding Brettanomyces for Improved Management in the Cellar
Lisha Nelson, CEO of Nelson Wine Estate in Paarl – Wine and Health
The dissertations are available to download on the Institute of Cape Wine Masters website – see here.
96/100.
Here are our top wines of last month:
Scions of Sinai Swanesang Syrah 2019 – 96 (read original review here)
Arcangeli Feiteras Verdelho 2017 – 93 (read original review here)
Kruger Family Wines Old Vines Chenin Blanc 2019 – 93 (read original review here)
Reyneke Reserve White 2017 – 93 (read original review here)
Scions of Sinai Gramadoelas Grenache Blanc 2019 – 93 (read original review here)
Scions of Sinai Granietsteen Chenin Blanc 2019 – 93 (read original review here)
Check out our South African wine ratings database.
It seemed appropriate, having written recently about cab and cab-based blends (at auction or not), that I should pull together what I’ve been able to find out about the history of this great variety in the Cape vineyard.
The honour of being the pioneer goes, it seems, once again, to Groot Constantia.
At the end of the 19th century, when (fortunately for our knowledge of the period) annual reports were being made to the Cape parliament from what was then the government wine-farm, a few reports mentioned “Cabernet Sauvignon or La Fitte grape” being first planted there some forty or so years earlier. The 1894 report remarks that “The variety was introduced to the Cape by one of the former proprietors of this farm a very long time past, but was never cultivated to any extent being a very shy bearer and shouldered out by another red grape – Hermitage [ie, cinsaut], a splendid cropper.”
A few years later, A. Mayer, the State Agricultural Assistant, wrote that he had earlier found “a few stocks … under cultivation at Constantia”, and had made “extensive” plantings of it at Groot Constantia in 1888 and 1889. By 1897, after some progress in making cab wines had already been reported, there were hopes “that in a season or two this fine wine will form another speciality for Constantia. What there is already to be disposed of has easily fetched the sum of £48 per leaguer.”
That mention of “disposing of” the wine might imply that Groot Constantia was not bottling any themselves, but they certainly soon were. I was sent a photo of a 1903 bottle of Groot Constantia “Cabernet de Sauvignon”, by Hennie Taljaard, the expert on old South African wine writing (see his useful website here); Hennie had found it in a KWV pamphlet about “Suid-Afrikaanse Wyngeskiedenis”. There might, I think, have been a slightly earlier Groot Constantia bottling, but this seems to be the very first bottled Cape cabernet we know of – and possibly one of the earliest varietally-labelled cabs anywhere.
I’d guess those early GC cabs were blended with softening cinsaut, but we can’t be sure. And by then plantings of cab were spreading (with Groot Constantia supplying stocks). Cab soon featured as a class in the Board of Horticulture’s Annual Wine Show. In 1910, for example, Class 16, for “5 leaguers Cabernet de Sauvignon”, attracted eight entries, with the judges commenting: “Very keen competition under this class, and the judges were very pleased with the quality of the prize wines.” These would not have been bottled, and what happened with the wines is unknown. We do know some of the prizewinners’ vital statistics, though, with what now seem Craven-like alcohol levels of 11.35% and 12.05% (probably from the cool Constantia area).
After those early days, little of the story seems known until around the middle of the 20th century – including about when the “de” was dropped from the name (how it had arrived there is also uncertain!). The oldest cab that I (and Michael Fridjhon, whom I consulted) knew of for sure, before Hennie enlightened me, was the famous Zonnebloem 1945, but I’m sure that wasn’t even the earliest Zonnebloem made. At that stage, it would have been made at the Simondium home-farm and taken to Stellenbosch Farmers Winery for bottling (later it started degenerating into the SFW/Distell brand – the farm’s name seemingly appropriated in a bit of sharp practice; you can download the fascinating, depressing story here, in Afrikaans).
It’s not certain if those early Zonnebloem Cabs were blends, but it seems likely they had about 10% cinsaut. That was a small percentage compared with most of the other so-called cabernets before the Wine of Origin legislation started tightening up on the accuracy of wine labels after 1973. Fanie De Jongh’s Encyclopedia of South African Wine (1981) says: “Next to Riesling, the name Cabernet has long been the most abused varietal name in South Africa. Millions of bottles of wine containing precious little or no Cabernet at all were sold under that label during the decades immediately preceding the Wine of Origin legislation.” Books I’ve consulted from the 1950s mention cabernet wines coming from various merchants and a handful of estates: Delheim (the first Delheim Cab was 1949), Muratie, Natte Valleij, Saxenburg, Uitkyk (Carlonet, of course), Oude Nektar, Rustenberg – clearly Stellenbosch had established itself as the great home of Cape cabernet; also Klaasenbosch in Constantia (now the site of the Cellars-Hohenort hotel). Plausibly, some of these might have been around for at least a few decades by then.
It was the 1970s that saw the great leap forward in plantings of cabernet here – and of certified authentic bottlings of the variety (progressively, over the years, approaching the now required 85%). From a pretty low base, the number of vines doubled between 1973 and 1979. That crucial decade saw the maiden vintages of subsequently famous Cabernet Sauvignons from, for example, Kanonkop (1973) and Meerlust (1975) – they preceded the now better known cab-based blends. From then till now and the numerous proud cabernet-based achievements of the Cape, especially from Stellenbosch of course, it’s been a matter of steady progress, to the point where cabernet is now the country’s most planted black grape, with 11% of the total hectarage.
Whether there remain any direct descendants of those first plantings at Constantia is doubtful – virus would probably have made sure of that. The youngest of the many clones now available in the country was first imported in 1967, and many of them came in the 1990s, when there was another big upsurge in plantings. The spirit though, is another thing, and as ever it’s important to know that we are continuing a story that began long ago. As always, I’d be grateful for corrections, amendments and additions to be made to what is just a tentative outline of that history.
Attention: Articles like this take time and effort to create. We need your support to make our work possible. To make a financial contribution, click here. Invoice available upon request – contact info@winemag.co.za
With the move to alert level 3 in terms of lockdown regulations to do with Coronavirus, we have re-arranged our tasting programme for 2020.
It was announced earlier in the year that Prescient, a multinational financial services company that has supported winemag.co.za’s annual reports on both Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon for the past five years, has expanded its sponsorship to all wine categories.
Prescient, a proudly South African company, was established in Cape Town in 1998, and has subsequently grown its operations across a range of financial disciplines globally.
It takes a special research process to successfully find investment potential and navigate through the high levels of volatility and unpredictability of the financial markets. In turn, Prescient recognises winemag.co.za’s purpose in seeking out and celebrating the best wines in South Africa, and its consequent appeal to those who appreciate that the production of a world-class wine, like investing, is a long-term proposition.
The new schedule is as follows:
|
Category |
Month of publication |
| Cap Classique Report | March |
| Sweet Wine and Fortifieds Report | March |
| Chenin Blanc Report | June |
| Cabernet Sauvignon Report | June |
| Cape Bordeaux Red Blend Report | July |
| Merlot Report | July |
| Shiraz Report | August |
| Pinotage Report | August |
| Signature Red Blend Report | September |
| Pinot Noir Report | September |
| Sauvignon Blanc Report | September |
| Chardonnay Report | October |
| Gala Event | October |
| Roadshow | November |
For full details concerning tasting entry dates, download the following: Winemag Reports Calendar 2020 Amended
Each report will be based on the outcome of a blind tasting of wines entered. Upon the release of a report, a top 10 will be announced and the year will culminate in a gala event when the individual best wine in each category will be revealed. These top-performing wines will subsequently be shown at tastings in both Johannesburg and London.
Subscribers receive daily reviews and in-depth reports before release to the public. Cancel any time.
