Durbanville property Nitida has announced that Helgard van Schalkwyk has joined as winemaker from last month. Van Schalkwyk was previously at near-by Altydgedacht, the wine business associated with that property closed by owners the Jean Parker Trust on 30 June.

In 2020, Jolette Steyn of the The Vineyard Party sourced Semillon from Constantia Uitsig and she speaks positively of the vintage, a cool growing season resulting in perfect ripening conditions. As with her maiden 2018 releases, two wine from the same fruit but featuring different vinification – tasting notes and ratings as follows:

Daisy If You Do 2020
Price: R265
Whole-bunch pressed, maturation lasting 10 months in older oak. Peach, citrus, hay, fynbos plus hints of bee’s wax and earth. The palate has a dense core of fruit and is lightly creamy in texture, bright acidity lending refreshment value – well balanced and full of flavour, the finish having a saline quality to it. A wine of precision. Alc: 13.3%.

CE’s rating: 94/100.

I’m Your Huckleberry 2020
Price: R265
100% skin contact for 15 days, maturation lasting 10 months in older oak. Top notes of floral perfume, hay, ginger and other spice precede citrus, stone fruit and some waxiness.  Concentrated fruit, snappy acidity, the finish slightly grippy and deeply savoury. Lots going on and completely delicious.

CE’s rating: 94/100.

Check out our South African wine ratings database.

Mengarie is the exploratory label of John Seccombe of Thorne & Daughters, allowing him to work with different vineyards around the Cape. He’s just released the second-ever tranche of wines, line-priced at R265 a bottle, tasting notes and ratings as follows:

Chenin Blanc Méthode Ancesterale Chenin Blanc 2021
Grapes from the Paardeberg in Swartland. Move from barrel to bottle while still fermenting. Flinty reduction to go with hints of citrus and peach on the nose while the palate has arresting acidity, a light bubble and a super-dry finish. Alc: 10.04%.

CE’s rating: 90/100.

Vermentino 2021
Grapes from Stellenbosch. Fermented and matured for 10 months in older oak. Lemon, orange and melon plus some subtle waxy character on the nose while the palate has nice weight and texture but is equally not short of verve – dense fruit, well-integrated acidity and a gently savoury finish. Alc: 13.73%.

CE’s rating: 91/100.

Mountain Chardonnay 2021
Grapes from Piekenierskloof and Ceres Plateau. Lemon plus some intriguing but hard-to-describe secondary notes on the nose. Good fruit concentration and snappy acidity before a pithy finish. Lively and full of flavour. Alc: 12.6%.

CE’s rating: 92/100.

Valley Chardonnay 2021
Pinotage 2022
Grapes from the Overberg. Subtle and inviting aromatics with a top note of blossom before pear, peach and citrus while the palate is light and fresh with a resolutely dry finish. Delicate and detailed, a charming wine. Alc: 12.96%.

CE’s rating: 92/100.

Pinotage 2022
Grapes from a Skurfberg vineyard planted in the mid-1990s. Carbonic maceration in stainless steel tank before being pressed to older barrels, maturation lasting nine months. Seductive aromatics of cherry, plum, pomegranate and floral perfume. Medium bodied with good freshness and lightly grippy tannins, the finish nicely dry. Does this have maturation potential? That’s irrelevant as its absolutely delicious now. A once-off bottling.

CE’s rating: 93/100.

Check out our South African wine ratings database.

Writing recently about such matters as winery size and appellation size, I made the hardly original, but I think important, point that the great model for ambitious new-wave winemakers in South Africa  is not Bordeaux – as it was here when the concept of the estate was paramount; rather it is “tiny-parcelled Burgundy (and Germany), where terroir is the mantra”.

An inevitable consequence of this is that some such producers are now offering different versions of wines made from the same grape, vinified pretty well identically, but relying for difference on the origins of the fruit. Makers of the great burgundian varieties, pinot noir and chardonnay, have of course been drawn to this idea: Storm, Crystallum, Iona, Oak Valley and Richard Kershaw come immediately to mind. The last two of those producers also introduce clonal differerences – making the game even more interesting for wine lovers, and, I confess, sometimes despairingly complicated for a critic trying to write notes adequately discriminating between them all and getting tangled up in the nomenclature quite apart from the aromas flavours and structures.

There are other bases for having more than one example of a grape in your range – possibly vineyard quality or vine age, as for the lower priced pinot and chardonnay from Paul Clüver, or barrel selection or different cellar treatments, as in Creation’s four pinots. Two of Capensis’s three chards are also not terroir-based. But I’m thinking here of terroir, when the winemaker takes grapes from areas with different mesoclimates, soils, slopes or whatever, and make wines from them in the same way.

And it’s not done only with the Burgundian varieties. Diemersdal, for example, has at least half a dozen sauvignon blancs, though that largely involves winemaking differences; Klein Constantia also has up to that many, involving terroir and winemaking differences. Richard Kershaw does his Deconstructed thing also with syrah, and the Mullineux have rather brilliantly established a prestigious market for their range of syrahs from distinctive soil types (now largely merging with the concept of single vineyard origins).

More pertinent to my present focus, Mullineux has similarly done so with chenin blanc, and have four such examples. (I checked with Andrea about the current absence of the Quartz version alongside, Shale, Granite and Schist; she says that version was temporarily  withdraw as “it presented a fresh yet textural component that was super-important to keep in the Old Vines White” – showing splendidly the priorities at this cellar, in defiance of the common misconception that the blended wines are somehow less important.)

It’s no coincidence that, in fact, there are now surely more multiple-terroir offerings of chenin in the Cape (and especially involving the Swartland) than of any other variety, given chenin’s wide planting and the large number of mature (“old”) vineyards. Many come from some of the best-known of the new-wave wineries. Alheit has six bottlings (if you include Cartology with its splash of semillon; quite widely sourced);  David & Nadia also has six (including a CWG Auction wine, four of them single Swartland vineyards); so too does Badenhorst (excluding Secateurs; all single vineyards on the home farm), though they’re seldom all available.

Six is perhaps a magic number for chenin bottlings, as that’s also how many are offered (I think!) by a probably less-known label: Roodekrantz. This splendid and growing range of wines was established by the Burgers of Roodekrantz farm and the Morkels of Diemerskraal about a decade ago to save the grapes of fine old vineyards from the vast blending vats of big brands. All the chenins are from registered Heritage Vineyards in Swartand, Paarl and Stellenbosch. All are elegant, refined and characterful, each with its own personality. They’re not all the same quality, perhaps (some vineyards are undoubtedly better than others), but all are at least good and recommendable, some excellent. And at prices vastly lower than the fancier names demand. Worth looking for.

There’s one aspect that occurs to me, though it’s not exactly troubling. When I wrote recently about the latest Sadie releases, including the new Rotsbank chenin, I remarked that the good news about the three chenins now available, “is that they are not only all good, but really distinct – something that doesn’t always apply when producers offer more than one chenin”. It might of course just be my inadequacy, but when I taste the amazing range of David & Nadia single-vineyard chenins – all of them superb, mostly from vineyards not all that distant from one another, nearly all made identically and with very close technical analysis – the differences tend to be subtle. As with the Badenhorst, if I sit down to compare them, I can revel in those subtleties. But spin me around and re-arrange the bottles, I’d mostly have trouble re-assigning them to their places, even helped by my notes. 

I partly make that point to suggest that if a chenin-lover can’t find all the David & Nadia chenins, or can’t afford them all at about R900 per bottle (as overwhelmingly most of us can’t), you’re not going to lose out all that much by having just one (except in terms of desirable volume, of course). Whereas I think most people will have more definite favourites amongst, say, the Sadie, Alheit, or Roodekrantz ranges. (And I’m scratching my head wondering if I’ve left out any more larger ranges of chenin – please comment, if you know of others that I don’t or have forgotten about.)

The rise of all these terroir ranges for different varieties in the Cape is a splendid thing, and testament to the ever-developing maturity off the fine-wine industry here. A pity they tend to be so pricey – but, inevitably, they’re made in small quantities, and by cultish producers; they are nonetheless to be welcomed and encouraged. I have no doubt, in fact, that there will be more.

• Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. He is a taster (and associate editor) for Platter’s. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution appeared in 2013.

Maverick producer Koen Roose of Elgin property Spioenkop was injured in a car crash in April last year forcing him to keep a low profile while he recovered but there are now a set of new releases, tasting notes and ratings as follows:  

Queen Manthatisi 2020
Price: R160
74% Sauvignon Blanc, 26% Chardonnay. Peach, citrus and some waxy character on the nose. Somewhat straightforward on the palate – okay concentration, tangy acidity, gently savoury finish. Creamy texture – SB for peeps who don’t like SB. Alc: 13.49% and RS: 6.45g/l!!!

CE’s rating: 89/100.

1900 Sauvignon Blanc 2021
Price: R195
Lime, white peach, grapefruit and blackcurrant, with fresh herbs in the background. The palate is dense and round but not without freshness – nice weight and texture. Residual sugar of 5g/l cannot be ignored. Alc: 13.74%.

CE’s rating: 92/100.

1900 Chardonnay 2022
Price: R290
Spontaneously fermented and matured for 10 months in oak barrels, 30% new. Malolactic fermentation: 5%. Neutral on the nose – hints of citrus and peach – the palate is understated; the fruit is pure and the wine carries its oak well. Tightly wound. Alc: 13.38%.

CE’s rating: 89/100.

Johanna Brandt Chenin Blanc 2019
Price: R325
Grapes from a vineyard on shale. Matured for 11 months in older oak. Some reduction before citrus, peach and herbs plus some subtle yeasty, wet wool notes. Powerful with a hit of sweet fruit on entry before the zippy acidity kick in, the finish dry. Idiosyncratic as Roose’s wines so often are. Alc: 14.13%.

CE’s rating: 92/100.

Riesling 2019
Price: R310
Wonderfully complex aromatics of blossom, lime, pear, peach, orange, spice and a hint of petrol in the background. Good fruit concentration matched by a great line of acidity – proper nuance and poise, the weight just right, the finish long. Alc: 13.12%.

CE’s rating: 95/100.

1900 Pinotage 2020
Price: R290
W.O. Stellenbosch. 10% whole-bunch. Matured for 11 months in old oak. The nose shows hints of red cherry and musk but predominantly more evolved notes of mushroom, forest floor, earth and spice. Medium bodied with fresh acidity, the tannins already resolved and mellow – drink now. Alc: 13.08%.

CE’s rating: 90/100.

Pinotage 2021
Price: R525

W.O. Elgin. Top notes of herbs and floral perfume before red currant, cherry and cassis. The palate shows pure fruit, racy acidity and powdery tannins – complex and exact. A lot of wine despite an alcohol of just 12.5%.

CE’s rating: 94/100.

Check out our South African wine ratings database.

At the release of her new Seascape wine range with their attractive, standout labels, Trizanne Barnard made short thrift explaining the vivid pictures associated with each wine. “When you drink the wine, you will know exactly the meaning of the image…”, “If you look at the label, you know exactly what’s inside…” Or something to that effect.

In other words, the images on the labels ‘explain’, ‘comment’ or/and drive the esoteric association of what the particular wine is. No need for words to ‘understand’ or ‘describe’ the wine. The picture is the message. From ‘taste’ the sensual jump is to ‘see’ or ‘view’ – the mash-up of the senses in a metaphorical way.   

It’s an old trick in the (especially poetry) book. And, quite frankly, in a cynical time when wine judges try their best to write words that explain their floating, exotic (high) scores, and so-called influencers just post “lovely red” or “smashing white” and “get it now” in their remarks about a wine, a little detour of vinous communication may not be a bad idea.

Every one of the seven Seascape wines has a label that visually and vividly differentiates the bottle’s identity. Even on a fleeting encounter one gets an impression that there is something more than decoration to the label’s message. It wants to communicate and entice like classic ‘abstract art’. Except that there seems always also to be a surfer in the picture. (Well, you know Trizanne and her sea passion.) So not quite mysteriously ‘abstract’. 

So you look closely, for example, at the label on Trizanne Barnard’s new Hemel-en-Aarde Barbera 2022 the cheerful, colourful playground of abstraction exudes a kind of energy and mystery. And inside the bottle one finds the alchemical pleasure of a wine from an unusual grape from an unusual site (Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge) of which that image says so much more than the typical tannic tangle of barbera and the charm of cherries and cloves, the balanced surge of the fine acidic surf, promising a future. Maybe you’ll even image the timbre of the surfer’s tide.

Yes, all that is what is known in the fancy world of the arts as rhetorical synaesthesia: remixing and repurposing the adjectives and adverbs used in sensual expression for new, witty and unusual ways of getting your creative message across. Beloved by poets, it cracks open language.

(Individual neurological conditions of synaesthesia have occupied scientists of the mind seriously since the English philosopher John Locke wrote about the blind man who ‘saw’ red when a trumpet sounded. It’s known as chromesthesia. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin even wrote music that employed a clavier à lumières (‘keyboard with lights’ of different colours.) 

The rhetorical example often sited is the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Voyelles’ (‘Vowels’), a sonnet in which the letters of the alphabet are given colours: “Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O: you vowels / Some day I’ll tell the tale of where your mystery lies…” (translation by George Dance).

Back to wine. And labels – of which an entire research department can be set up to analyse, philosophise and do market research on.

Overall, the spectrum of wine labels range from the basic (information about content, origin, etc) to a sophisticated scheme to entice, puzzle or bamboozle. On rare occasions there is an air of grandeur and ‘high culture’ when art which previously existed as ‘real paintings’ or not are applied upon expensive paper, embossed, gilded, et al.

(Seascape’s are a delicious mash-up of computer manipulated imagery. The famous Château Mouton Rothschild’s most recent vintage features a ‘real painting’ by the British artist Peter Doig reproduced on the label.)

The message in the bottle, exposed outside, is one that addresses the visual sense. The content inside goes for the taste sense. And somewhere in between the wine drinker’s mind gets involved in the experience. It’s a set-up for the fun park of synaesthesia.

Talking of fun: the Hungarian linguist Ullmann Istvan (also known as Stephen Ullmann) in 1957 formulated the romantic order of our five senses, from low to high (touch, taste, smell, sound, sight) according to the extent of the vocabulary we use describing each. With wine (taste) lower than label (sight), the case for synaesthesia seems made. Trizanne Barnard has it spot on.

• Melvyn Minnaar has written about art and wine for various local and international publications over the years. The creativity that underpins these subjects is an enduring personal passion. He has served on a few “cultural committees”.

Winemaker Clarise Sciocatti-Langeveldt says of her own label project “Il Geco” that it’s no longer a “side-hustle” – she handed in her resignation at Stellenbosch property Hazendal property before the start of the 2023 harvest and is now going it alone. Tasting notes and ratings for her new releases as follows:

Il Geco Cap Classique 2017
Price: R395
A 60:40 blend of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from Tulbagh matured for some 60 months on the lees. Zero dosage. Citrus, peach and a hint of strawberry plus freshly baked bread. The palate is lean with bracing acidity and a fine mousse. Clean and focused. Alc: 12.5%.

CE’s rating: 91/100.

Il Geco Pinot Gris 2022
Price: R235
W.O. Stellenbosch – grapes from a vineyard planted in 2009. Spontaneously fermented and matured for 12 months in old 500-litre barrels. Hay, fynbos, stone fruit and apple plus some leesy complexity on the nose while the palate has good fruit weight matched by punchy acidity. A characterful wine with layers of flavour. Alc: 13%.

CE’s rating: 91/100.

Il Geco Sangiovese 2022
Price: R235
W.O. Simonsberg-Paarl. Spontaneously fermented and matured for 12 months in old 500-litre barrels. Floral perfume before red cherry and a hint of earth on the nose. Light and fresh with fine, slightly powdery tannins. Unassuming but still charming.

CE’s rating: 89/100.

Check out our South African wine ratings database.

One of the great traditions of red wine service is decanting. It’s the practice of opening a bottle that has been standing upright for some time, and then carefully, in one continuous motion, transferring the wine into another container, typically a clear glass decanter. In the past, when wine was either an elite drink or a commodity, this act was reserved for the elite end of the market. Here, red wines would traditionally be aged for many years to soften their tannic structure. During this ageing process, they would typically throw a sediment: gunk that accumulates through the precipitation of tartrates and also various tannin complexes that have fallen out of solution. If someone tried to pour the wine directly from the bottle, then after the first few pours the wine would become cloudy as the sediment that had gathered at the bottom of the bottle was agitated. And the last couple of pours would be more-or-less undrinkable, with gritty sediment in suspension. So in a fancy country house, the butler would head down to the cellar in the morning, and stand the dinner bottles up. Then, in the evening, they would be decanted carefully before taking upstairs for serving. The elaborate way of decanting is to use a decanting cradle and a candle so that you can see when the first sediment is coming out, and then stop pouring into the decanter. This sort of decanting-to-remove-sediment is incredibly practical and still useful today when dealing with older traditionally made wines, but perhaps not for the very oldest wines, for reasons we’ll come to later.

Most red wines drunk these days have no sediment in them. It’s very rare to encounter a bottle with sediment, partly because of steps in modern winemaking processes such as filtration and fining, but more significantly because almost all red wines are drunk young, and even fancy Bordeaux tends to get drunk young enough that it hasn’t thrown much in the way of a gunky deposit. So decanting to ensure the wine pours clear and sediment-free is a niche activity reserved for quite old bottles.

What are the other reasons for decanting? Most decanting these days is done for the reason of ‘opening up’ a tighter young wine. This is where we get into the topic of wine aeration. Aside from a traditional decanter, you can also buy a range of devices designed to aerate the wine as it is being poured, some of which are quite elaborate. That’s not to mention the two devices with magnets in them that claim to change the tannic structure of the wine, something that even sensible and seemingly intelligent people were convinced about, although there no scientific reason to put wines in a magnetic field. Think about it: if magnets changed the character of the tannins in a red wine in a positive way, then surely most wineries would be using them, as this would be a much quicker and cheaper way of improving red wine structure than extended elevage. And while we might be impressed by seeing magnetic power in action on things that are actually magnetic (Whoah! Invisible forces!), consider this: when you go for an MRI scan you experience insanely strong magnetic fields but come out unchanged! Put a bottle of wine in an MRI scan and I’d bet a lot of money it wouldn’t be changed, and this is a magnet vastly stronger than anything in these wine ageing devices.

Back to decanting to open-up closed red wines. What is happening scientifically? Basically, you are exposing the wine to air, which contains oxygen. Wine can only take up a certain amount of oxygen (the exact amount depends on temperature), and then once the oxygen is dissolved in the wine oxidation reactions will begin. This is where we have the clash between science, experience and expectation. No one has really looked at the science of the flavour chemistry in decanting, but lots of people have made claims about what goes on phenomenologically. Oxidation reactions have been studied, but not at the time scale involved in a typical decant.

The popular notion is that a young red wine, particularly one destined for long ageing, needs decanting to unfurl – to release its aromatic potential. I quite like decanting in this sort of situation: after all, what have you got to lose? A robust young red wine isn’t going to suffer from a little oxygen pick-up over the course of an evening, and intuitively it seems that the act of decanting might well help open it up. But does it? When we decant, we never do the control, so we can’t really say. We may experience the wine opening up, but this could have happened without decanting, and over the course of an evening we change, never mind the bottle of wine. Now an overnight decant, or a double decant the morning before a dinner, might be expected to have some effect because there’s time for oxygen to have some effect even with a young wine. But for a young wine decanted and then served over the course of a dinner, it isn’t easy to come up with a good scientific explanation for how the wine might be opening up chemically. One study from China used a liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry method that could look at changes in organic acids and polyphenols simultaneously, and they applied this to decanted wines. They showed that the levels of most of these 20 compounds were decreased by decanting. But wouldn’t they also be decreased by pouring wine into a glass and letting it sit a while?  

Another study from Australia showed a reduction in alcohol levels in pre-poured wines in a competition setting. Reducing the alcohol will release some of the aromatic components in a wine: studies have shown that rising levels increasingly bind wine aromas. This could be one explanation for the effect of decanting on wine aromatics, but studies would need to look specifically at how much decanting reduces alcohol by.

There is, of course, the psychological impact of the act of decanting. It can elevate the way we feel about the wine, and this in turn can affect our perception. Imagine serving guests a modern young claret: if you take the bottle and decant it, and then serve it in a fancy glass, it increases the chance of this wine being seen favourably by the table.

Some old wines are best not decanted, though, even if they are likely to have sediment. A good way to serve an old wine is to open the bottle, leave it for a while, and then take a taste. If it seems fragile and the aromas quite delicate, then pour from the bottle. There is potentially a lot to be lost from a delicate old wine by decanting it. It should not be the default action for such wines.

And what about whites? Not many people decant them, but I know many people who think that serious whites with some bottle age, or even younger naturally made whites, stand to benefit from decanting. I like this idea.

Still, there is a lot of mythology around the whole practice of decanting and aeration, and few studies have looked carefully at this. Often people do side by side comparisons that aren’t blind, and this is a bad idea. The power of suggestion can influence perception, even if we are experienced tasters. Triangle studies blind are the way to go: if you can’t spot the odd wine out, then your opinions in this case don’t mean anything. This keeps us honest. One study has looked at the impact of fancy aerators on wine, but in a significant way. For his MSc thesis at Cornell, David Brandley examined the effect of the Aervana Luxury Wine Aerator and the Vintorio Omni wine aerator on a red wine. By using a triangle test with experimental subjects, he showed that there was no significant difference between the treated and untreated wines for both devices. All we need now is someone to do the same study with decanting.

• Jamie Goode is a London-based wine writer, lecturer, wine judge and book author. With a PhD in plant biology, he worked as a science editor, before starting wineanorak.com, one of the world’s most popular wine websites.

Here are our eight most highly rated wines of last month:

Mullineux Schist Roundstone  Syrah 2021 – 98 (read original review here)
Sadie Family Wines Columella 2021 – 98 (read original review here)
Sadie Family Wines The Old Vine Series ‘T Voetpad 2022 – 98 (read original review here)
Savage Girl Next Door Syrah 2022 – 98 (read original review here)
Lourens Family Wines Skuinskap Single Vineyard Chenin Blanc 2022 – 97 (read original review here)
Mullineux Granite Eikelaan Chenin Blanc 2022 – 97 (read original review here)
Mullineux Granite Jakkalsfontein  Syrah 2021 –  97 (read original review here)
Sadie Family Wines Palladius 2021 – 97 (read original review here)

After graduating from the University of Stellenbosch with a degree in Viticulture and Oenology, Pieter Smit started his career as a viticulturist in 1989 at Jonkershoek property Oude Nektar, were oversaw the replanting of all the vineyards, working closely with the late Prof. Eben Archer as well as Neil Ellis. Today those vineyards supply fruit for the sought-after Stark-Conde wines.

Later he and his wife Michelle moved back to family property Amperbo in Bottelary which has long supplied several leading producers. The Smits always aspired to make their own wines, however, and 2021 was their maiden vintage.

One of these wines is an intriguing 80:20 Pinotage Tempranillo blend, the same blocks utilised for the Neil Ellis Bottelary Pinotage and Neil Ellis CWG Amper Bo Tempranillo respectively.

Smit’s wine underwent spontaneous fermentation before maturation lasting 18 months in barrels, 30% new and 70% fifth-fill. The nose shows heady aromas of black and blue berries, floral perfume, dried herbs, earth and spice while the palate has good fruit depth and firm but well managed tannins. At 15.01% alcohol, it’s close to redlining – plenty of fruit concentration but balance is just about retained. Price: R225 a bottle.

CE’s rating: 91/100.

Check out our South African wine ratings database.