Michael Fridjhon: Pinotage turns 100 – time to grow up about it

You would have to be less than half-literate and perversely uninterested not to note that 2025 is the Centenary Year of Pinotage. Even if pinotage is not your cultivar of choice this is a big deal. Very few varietal crossings survive beyond the laboratory and the nursery; even fewer make it out into the wider world of wine. Of these, by far the greatest percentage are invisible beyond their regions of production. None, as far as I can tell, ever reach 5% of the national vineyard. Pinotage has hovered at around 7.5% for at least a decade, having grown almost three-fold in 30 years.

Clearly pinotage is an important component in South Africa’s red wine offering – which makes it important to interrogate why it still has so many detractors. No single variety appeals to everyone: sauvignon blanc drinkers are often vitriolic about chardonnay, while chardonnay aficionados are equally uncharitable about sauvignon blanc. Merlot is SA’s top selling red cultivar and yet it’s the one which gets the worst press from the critics.

But there is a peculiarly acrimonious element to how those who do not like pinotage engage about our national (red) wine treasure, as if the dislike is legitimate and the expectation is that everyone will be thinking the same. It’s a little like racism: everyone thinks that everyone else shares the same views, so you can make jokes and snigger behind your hands with only the victim ostensibly unaware of what it’s all about.

There’s no denying pinotage went through a bad patch – in fact a couple of bad patches, but so too did most SA red wine cultivars. We produced some pretty awful cabernets in the 1980s (and well into the 1990s). Several high profile pinotage bottlings harboured textbook brett notes (that might be an understatement) until around 2015, but the same is certainly true of Shiraz over the same period. If green, edgy tannins cause some anguish, merlot may actually be the front-runner – so why exactly has everyone been so hard on pinotage?

I have a suspicion – and this is at best a guess – that some of the negativity is a combination of national cringe coupled with bandwagon effect. If something is difficult to understand and even harder to defend, it’s easier to capitulate to the playground bully. Someone in the room – perhaps a little tentatively – says he/she likes pinotage and a few loud mouths say “are you crazy?” Then they quote Michael Broadbent’s or Andre van Rensburg’s memorable putdowns (relevant perhaps in some bygone era) and no one feels brave enough to point out that the pinotages available today cannot be compared to the wines being rubbished – just as the chenins today bear no resemblance to the co-op steens of the 1980s.

So pinotage may be the cultivar that everyone likes to hate – and it is possible that those whose job it is to manage the variety’s public image have not done the best job about addressing this. I remember Beyers Truter, sometime in the early 1990s, telling me I was wasting my time trying to raise the profile of chenin blanc. I’m not sure if this was because he doubted that chenin had the potential. I do know that he believed that as an industry we needed to work with our best calling card, and in his opinion pinotage was the ideal candidate.

So maybe part of the reason chenin succeeded was that it was the underdog, and it’s equally possible that pinotage failed because of a commensurate sense of entitlement. Its public persona could do with a bit of an upgrade: chenin has profited from the sometime whacky, often zany and certainly highly individualistic personalities of its arch exponents. With the best will in the world it would be difficult to say this about the pinotage brigade. Just a quick look at the Pinotage Association – its executive and management committees – will evoke an impression which is more 1980s than 2020s.

This may be a fair reflection of the reality – of the people with enough experience and seniority to occupy these positions, coupled with the absence of newcomers ready to nail their colours to the pinotage mast. If that’s the case, perhaps the first thing the association needs to do is look to the producers of wines which don’t necessarily fit their stereotype – and to co-opt them.

There is an increasing excitement on the fringes of the category: cuvées which are almost Burgundian in their aromatic intensity but are still refined, wines made accessible with a little carbonic maceration, bottlings where the tannins speak of the cinsaut and pinot noir parentage (rather than wannabe armour-plated monsters). Perhaps this means that this centenary year is a good time for us all to be revisiting our attitudes about pinotage.

We need to re-discover what the variety has to offer – which may mean looking beyond the ABSA Top 10 winners to the geekier possibilities (see results of the Prescient Fund Services category report here). And we need to stop hiding behind the playground bullies. We all know the adage “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The contrary also applies: we should stand up for pinotage with all its potential and all its possibilities. We can make this our contribution to its next century.

• Michael Fridjhon has over thirty-five years’ experience in the liquor industry. He is the founder of Winewizard.co.za and holds various positions including Visiting Professor of Wine Business at the University of Cape Town; founder and director of WineX – the largest consumer wine show in the Southern Hemisphere and chairman of The Trophy Wine Show.