A Platterising blog

Some ongoing random notes from Tim James sparked by impressions from
tasting for the 2008 Platter Guide

Clearing up  28 August 2007

What happens to those unused samples?
 

It could be cynically claimed that unreliable corks have had quite a benefit for some winewriters and the organisers of wine competitions – because producers have to submit extra samples in case the first one is corked. (This doesn't seem to happen with Wine mag, I notice. Occasionally one sees an indication that a wine has scored no stars because it is corked; they clearly don't believe in second chances there!)

Some competitions demand more than two samples, of course - I rather think Veritas requires 12, which can represents quite  lot of money. What happens to all the left-overs, one wonders? A year or two back I did hear that the Winemakers' Choice organisers were trying to get a retailer to buy all their extra bottles, but I have no idea if other competitions do this.

Platter asks for two samples of each wine. I had only a few corked wines this year, and there were only a few cases where I wanted to open the second bottle for other reasons (to get another opinion in the most dithering cases; twice where I thought the wine was actually faulty and wanted the opinion of someone more proficient than I in this field). The net result is that I was left with two or three hundred bottles cluttering up the space that I have become increasingly anxious to purge of reminders of Platter.

These second bottles are, I dare say, the legitimate 'perks' of the tasters (we do get paid reasonably well for the work, incidentally - one of the reasons why Platter is such an extremely expensive book to produce, as the publisher ruefully reminds us occasionally.) But, frankly, most of them I do not want. This year I have hung on to about a dozen bottles: those that I think I'll want to drink in two or five or ten years, or that I think will serve some other interesting tasting purpose.

The others I mostly pack up in sixes (the standard pack being five reds and one white, with one of the bottles being unfinished in terms of packaging - no label, capsule or whatever), in three broad price bands. They're sold to an established and keen half -dozen customers, at something like 50-60 percent of ther retail value. The buyers don't know what they're getting in the sealed boxes, but come back the next year so they must be satisfied.

The money thus raised goes (appropriately, I hope you agree) to the Pebbles Project, which helps with the educational needs of children in the winelands, particualrly those suffering from foetal alcohol syndrome. Angela Lloyd does the same as I do, and in the past three or so years we have raised a few tens of thousands of rands through such sales. It's a nice way to end off the Platter tasting season.

And now, of course, I am able again to choose what wine to drink with dinner each night - for the past few months it has too often been a case of sometimes already having had enough (through the sampling) or wanting just a half-glass or two of whatever is best or readiest of what has been tasted. Sometimes preferring to have water, frankly – I seldom actually enjoy drinking these very young wines, particularly reds of course, even ones I have rated highly because of what they will be offering in a few years to those sensible enough to tuck them away at the bottom of a cupboard (or preferably somewhere cooler than that).

Have we done well or badly? 23 August 2007

The Platter tasters’ work comes to an end

Most of the announcements made, clutching the spreadsheet which shows all the decisions made by all the tasters at the five-star taste-off, it’s time to wonder about what we’ve done, both individually and collectively.

It must be said that the final tasting to select the five star wines has elements common to all big blind panel tastings – that is, some of the results might seem rather strange. Some of them certainly ARE strange. The seductiveness of a bit of sugar, the impressiveness of big (but balanced) alcohols, the disadvantages of quiet elegance (does Morgenster ever stand a chance in this sort of competition?) inevitably come into play in a way that they don’t necessarily when one is sitting down quietly at length with a wine.

I know all the arguments in favour of blind tastings, I promise, and all the problems associated with judging a wine whose reputation, etc one knows. Nonetheless, I would rather have to defend the assessments I made of wines over a few days while sitting by myself at home, than to defend the assessments I made of 90 wines tasted in one morning’s work.

As an illustration of something or other, take the top Vergelegens. I’m pretty convinced that the red V is an excellent wine, and I wrote in this blog before how it changed over time when I was assessing it at home. I was confident that it deserved a top rating. It didn’t make the cut at the tasting, and I didn’t vote for it myself. I’m not surprised at that, nor angry at myself or others for not discerning, under those circumstances, what I believe to be its quality.

I nominated for five stars both the standard Vergelegen White blend, and the special reserve version that I reported earlier was possibly going to be a White V (though that is far from certain, apparently). It seemed likely to me in advance that the ‘Reserve’ one would walk it, while the as yet quieter, less showy White might have trouble. In the end, it was the standard white which came through (it seems silly to talk about a ‘standard’ one when this is undoubtedly one of the Cape’s finest wines, red or white, year in year out); it’s sheer quality took it there.

The ‘Reserve’ white got no more than one positive vote out of the eleven (and it wasn’t mine). I have no doubt whatsoever that we must have tasted a bottle that was less than perfect, but not damaged enough (by cork taint or random oxidation, perhaps) to make anyone suspect that something was wrong, that it was something other than a not particularly good wine.

Kanonkop Cabernet 2003 was one of my nominations, and I was particularly pleased that it got its five stars, especially after the Paul Sauer 2003 last year didn’t get a top rating, as I firmly think it should. Kanonkop is still one of our finest producers, and this reminds us of that.

Oddly, very oddly I think, no chardonnays made it, though some came close. I’d nominated Hamilton Russell 2006, which I still think is a first-class wine that we made a collective mistake in not rewarding with five stars. I’m pleased that I voted for it – but sorry that I didn’t vote for the Ataraxia 2006, which was also there.

But hey, that’s life, as they say. We chose some pretty good wines, I think, even if we also didn’t choose some equally good.

The Platter season draws to a close for most of us – though the poor editor is working long, long hours at a pace that fills me with both horror and admiration, and with a dedication, meticulousness and skill that fills me with only admiration. I have a bit of editing and proofreading work to do still, but no more tasting. But I might continue with this blog in some form – it’s a much quicker easier way of writing than sitting down to produce an article that must have beginning, middle and end. And as one seldom knows, anyway, if anyone is reading the stuff, well, why not. We’ll see….

Five stars

Unfortunately the camera business didn't work out quite as intended, and I got rather sidetracked by the wine at first, and probably made a little forgetful by it later....

In the picture which I've now moved to the entry above, is my place before it got too messy. Ten sauvignons poured there and some white blends. Only one sauvignon made it through, but the white blends did very well – the best-performing category, along with the 'ports' (the results will be announced today, Monday, and no doubt Grape will be the first to carry them!).

nd here are a few of the other tasters I could easily see seated around the table. There were eleven of us, I think, which made the independent accountant's job that much easier, as he could mostly go by a majority vote, without getting into the scoring intricacies which come into play if there's a ties vote. (Basically, tasters were asked to vote Yes or No for the wines to get five stars, but there were three scorable categories of strength for each vote - Very strong yes, Strong yes,  yes; etc.)

On the left Mzo Mvemve. Below, Jörg Pfützner, with Roland Peens a little more out of focus, and in the background Tokozane (I never heard his surname), chief pourer – and emptier of spittoons, doing which he made one of his many drily funny remarks, in this case about 'Five-star papsakke', which got Dave Swingler talking about 'organic salivary stabilisation of wine'.

Nearly 100 wines there were to taste (the last ten being the finalists for the 'Superquaffer of the year' title). For me, my doubts about the possibility of doing justice to so many wines in a tasting came into play. Add in the mathematics of likehood when a panel of eleven is involved, and I'm not surprised to see omitted from the final list some wines that I think are truly excellent. But the twenty that got through this obstacle course certainly deserve their stars, I reckon, and I'm delighted to congratulate their makers (though the wines are, for a few more hours at least, nameless.)

Sauvignons again 17 August 2007

... as things wind down

The Platter tasting season is drawing to an end. Oddly, I’m finishing as I begun, with a flurry of good sauvignon blancs (actually I suppose, if one is going to be pedantically French about it, the plural should be sauvignons blancs). Oak Valley, that fine new producer in the Elgin valley, finally sent in their 2007, which had only recently been bottled, so I could finish writing up the notes that I’d begun with their lovely Chardonnay and Pinot Noir many weeks ago. There is no 2006 Oak Valley Mountain Reserve to follow that brilliant 2005 (which is appearing on the Nederburg Auction this year, and deserves to get a very good price). Perhaps there will be a 2007 – but they are sensibly deciding to be very picky and choosy, and will only have one if they are convinced it’s a cut above the standard. The standard one is certainly up to the expected high … standard.

Another fine newish producer, Constantia Glen, is also picky and choosy, and decided not to submit their latest Sauvignon at all, as it had been bottled too recently and they think that ‘bottle shock’ means it won’t be showing adequately for some time.

And then there were two from Nitida, in Durbanville. They also make a standard and a special – Club Select their top one is called. They’re pretty close in style, I find, with the Select having just a bit more of everything. Nitida are very good at making immensely drinkable wines. The Semillon 2006 is as delicious and fresh as ever  – easier in its youth than many semillons, and there’s a 2005 blend of sauvignon and semillon called Coronata, which I didn’t know, and which is also very good.

The Nitida reds (I tasted Shiraz, Pinotage, Cabernet and a blend called Speciosa this year) are less special than the whites in my opinion – but I bet they move out of the cellar pretty quickly. The 2006s I’ve just sampled are perfectly ready for drinking now (though they should keep nicely for a few years), with lots of ripe fruit, an almost chewy texture, and soft tannins. Not serious wines, perhaps (which is fine by me), but very tasty and easy-going. Last year, unlike this year, there was a Sparkling Shiraz, but if that wine goes I don't think it'll be huge loss to wine-loving humanity. But who knows, maybe people loved it – enough, even, to buy a second bottle, which is the real test – and it's all sold out, with none to spare for curmudgeonly Platter tatsters/.

I’m hoping there’ll be some tasty as well as serious wines at the five-star line-up today  (Friday). Presumably there’ll be 70 or 80 wines as usual, and with any luck we’ll get 20 or 25 five-star wines out of them. We being the 14-odd (or 14 odd?) tasters – more this year than ever before. I shall try to remember to take my camera, so I can get some pictures for this blog. I’m thinking of a series showing everyone’s post-tasting red-stained teeth. If they'll pose.

Gilded flying pigs 13 August 2007

Not to mention scrawled-on sticky labels

Some of the Platter wines are samples drawn from tank or barrel and run into a bottle just for our convenience. Some arrive in all their finished glory: labelled, capsuled, and occasionally even swathed in tissue paper. Many are bottled but are still awaiting the persuasive packaging: they get sent with all manner of indications as to their contents: from a scrawled few words on a tiny sticky label to a carefully altered label from a previous vinatge.

And it’s certainly not unknown for a caseful of wines to arrive at the Platter central depot totally undifferentiated – the Merlot indistinguishable in its unlabelled bottle from the Cab. (You’d be surprised at the size of the team employed by Platter simply to try to sort things out with producers who’ve sent in incomplete ranges with no explanation, documentation with details omitted, and the like. By the time the wines are delivered to the tasters at their homes, or are lined up to be tasted at the main tasting venue, most of the problems are sorted out, and we can proceed with our judicious sniffing, swirling, spitting, worrying – or not,  and writing.)

My point, eventually arrived at, is that it is not always that we get the chance to see the finished product, which is a pity, as a lot more packaging these days is really good. One of my favourites is the Cape Vintage Port from Peter Bayly, of which I recently tasted the (fullly packaged) 2005, which is the second vintage made.

Peter Bayley, the owner-winemaker of this small Calitzdorp venture, was a hotelier, I believe, and I’d guess that he’d long wanted to make a port,  but that the likelihood was pretty much that of seeing pigs fly. Hence the delightful gold flying pig on the bottle. The bottle is very charming itself, in fact – 500 millilitres rather than the usual 750 (which is a good idea for a port, that you’re not going to want to drink a ot of in one sitting; Axe Hill is similarly sized), and skittle-shaped. Altogether an asset to any after-dinner table.

The wine itself is good too – more delicious in its youth than many Vintage Ports, and in fact it seems to me that it has rather more of the character of a good quality Late Bottled Vintage (not that it is late-bottled), or a good Ruby. There’s an approachable grapey freshness to it, and the freshness is underlined by a good acidity and a lack of the massive, gripping tannins which the best Vintage ports generally show. I’ve no idea how it will mature over ten years or so – maybe better than I suspect; but in fact I would be very happy to drink it now, while waiting for more tannic wines of the same vintage (Bredell, Boplaas, etc) to unfold their glories – it would be sinful to drink those wines now, but not the Peter Bayly.

I mentioned this to fellow Platter taster Jörg Pfützner, who’s the chief sommelier at Aubergine Restaurant, saying that I thought it would be a very good wine to have at a restaurant because of its easy youthful approachability. He agreed – so much so that he’d reached the same conclusions some time ago, and offers the Peter Bayly by the glass at Aubergine. A nice way of finishing off a good meal – if someone else is driving you home afterwards.

Incidentally, there is another wine going to be coming from Peter Bayly, a Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 (packaging not finished in this case). It seems to me very much the wine of a port-maker: dark, extracted, ripe, and powerful – even aromatically there was some port character, I thought, along with nice fresh blackcurrant. A characterful, interesting wine, which I really am curious to try again in a few years, to see how it matures.

New wines in new bottles 10 August 2007

A super-ambitious white, biodynamic reds, and some go down the drain

Some people, of course, know that Platter tasting involves little more than looking at the label and the price and awarding a commensurate score, or else just giving more or less the same score as it got before. Well, yes, of course. Sometimes we don’t even go through the motions of opening the bottle sent us.

But the problem comes when we get new wines, and there are a lot of those about. How on earth do we know what to score them? Sometimes we don’t even know what price they’re going to be sold at, so we’re in real trouble. We have to actually taste the stuff.

I spoke of Vergelegen V before, and one of my newbies has a connection with that. Winemaker André van Rensburg can’t resist trying to make more and better wines all the time and now there’s going to be, it looks like, a white V. No doubt at a ridiculous price – but will it be high enough to make those conspicuous consumers drink it? I hope so, as they might discover something pretty special, and learn to at least admire a wine that’s a bit different from the opaque, powerful, fruity, oaky, tannic (or sometimes softly smooth) reds that they seem to thrive on.

One of the mysteries of local wine – and very irritating to the experts who like to think that consumers follow their advice – is that Vergelegen White (the ‘standard’ top-of-the range one for a mere few hundred rands) takes about a year to sell out from the farm, despite its tiny quantities. Though it’s a wine that many people regard as one of the very best wines – not just white wines – in the country; it gets Platter five stars regularly and trophies galore at the Trophy Wine Show.

I wonder if the new V (if that’s what this nearly-pure semillon is going to become) will do any better when it’s released (later this year, I’d guess). It seems an excellent wine to me – perhaps more showy and exciting in youth than the White blend, which is also semillon-based, but has more sauvignon blanc – about 20% instead of just 7%.

Biodynamic reds
Another new wine ventured onto my tasting bench this week – three of them in fact – that I had to actually taste before rating, rather than relying on reputation and price. They’re also made in tiny quantities and are far from mainstream, but I hope they also get the drinkers they deserve. They’re not yet released, and I don’t know the price –  they won’t be cheap, I don’t think. At least one of them certainly shouldn’t be.

Schonenberg is the name of the property, and it’s up there in the Riebeek area of the Swartland. The grapes are grown and made according to biodynamic principles (something that doesn’t impress me at all per se, but I have to pretend to be objective when doing Platter tasting). That certainly means a lot of love and attention being given to the wines as well as some things that don’t convince me like, apparently, moving the wines from one barrel to another only at full moon.

What I do really like is the way the grapes are picked quite early, before the alcohol levels rocket (and I’m pretty sure even Tim Atkin wouldn’t find them green, though there is admittedly a herbal touch which I find fits in pretty well). and there’s not a splinter of new wood in sight, so one’s getting lovely pure, fresh, untrammelled fruit. The model, perhaps, is another little-known, tiny but ambitious Swartland winery, The Observatory. (Sadly I’m not doing them for Platter this year – they were whisked away and sent I know not where: I hope they’re being treated well.)

There’s a Schonenberg Pinotage, and a Cape Blend, and the one I like most, a Syrah. All 2006. The Syrah is one of the few of my tasting samples that I’ve drunk all the way down – its lack of wood and lowish alcohol (13.1%) make it accessible (if not yet as good as it’ll become when mature) and just the sort of wine I like. Not necessarily the ‘best’, of course, which can sometimes be another matter entirely.

In case you’re wondering what happens to the hundreds of bottles I don’t drink all the way down (many of them lose little more than a sip) – most go to neighbours, friends and colleagues. Some of the worst simply get thrown away as I can’t think anyone would like them, and some of the best go to my dentist, whom I’m very eager to please.

Letting wine age...  6 August 2007

... for five nights, at least
 

There’s a lot of comfort in a quick sniff, swirl and spit in a big line-up of wines in a competition. You might be wrong in your judgement, but you don’t get tormented by that possibility (there isn’t the time before you move on to the next wine).

It’s not like that for me when working my way through the wines for Platter. Usually, that is. Sometimes a wine is clearly what it sets out to be, sometimes pretty much the same as last year’s sample, and even a ditherer can assign it a rating and venture to fling a few words of description at it. This applies more to simple, small wines, of course, but sometimes to more ambitious ones also – and I have on occasion gone back three or four times to a pretty ordinary wine over a tasting session, sometimes returning the next day, to confirm what I thought of it.

I suspect I do this dithering more than many of the Platter tasters, being rather less confident in my judgements than some people think I am. (For very good reasons, no doubt a few will add.) But I know that a wine can taste pretty different once it’s been opened for a while (sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes just different). It can also taste different depending on what else I’ve been eating or drinking, or how my saliva is flowing at a particular time, no doubt. These are things known by everyone who drinks their wine with more or less attention, and are things largely ignored by every big, blind-tasting wine competition. (Though, admittedly, some of the changes are pretty superficial, and don’t affect structures or fundamental characters.)

This wonderful process of change in a single wine was made particularly clear to me with one of Vergelegen’s grandest bottlings. I can’t imagine I’m letting out a close secret by saying that there is to be a 2004 Vergelegen V released later this year – the cabernet that comes out at high price in the best vintages (I’ve no insider knowledge at all as to whether there will be a 2005 version, but my experience of that vintage means I might be willing to wager just a small amount that there won’t be).

I opened the bottle last Monday evening, and it was immediately very impressive – big and bold, yes, but more elegant than the two previous releases, I thought (especially than the 2001 which in retrospect was not particularly good, really). The next day, the aromas were dominated by oak, the fruit was duller; the wine seemed overdone, clumsier. And I was confused. Which was the wine I should write my notes on? Another 24 hours passed, and the wine was firmly returning to its previous condition, and my initial more positive ideas were confirmed.

On the following Saturday evening, I was going to dinner with some friends, and gathered up a few opened Platter samples to take for drinking. Then I noticed the bottle of V in a corner of the floor, uncorked, and by now two-thirds empty. As not many people (not, anyway, the ones I tend to prefer to mix with outside of wine circles) get the chance to try R700 bottles of wine, I thought I’d take it along, just for interest’s sake (it’s not yet even labelled, so there’s just this weighty bottle with a scrawled sticky label). This was five days after it had been opened, so I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, it was still showing well, its flavours and youthful harmony scarcely dimmed. My friends loved their little glassfuls.

That’s impressive. I’d say to anyone who eventually buys a bottle or two of it – put it away somewhere cool and dark for a year or two for each of those five nights, and then it’ll be approaching its best. A best I hope to try. But I have little doubt that Allan Pick and his customers, and others of that impatient, unenlightened ilk, will have emptied most of the bottles before the wine’s even properly set out on its long march to (splendid, I hope) maturity.

Whether V represents the best of Vergelegen is another matter. I have mixed feelings about that, as I do about so many things to do with wine. I wish I were as confident as I am opinionated.

In praise of screwcaps 1 August 2007
(but really only because they're easiest to open)

Of the 150 or so wines I’ve sampled (I'd guess) in recent weeks for Platter, two have been badly tainted by faulty cork – one a very expensive Pinot that I was very pleased I hadn’t had to pay for. Given that I’ve had quite a few dozen wines with those horrible plastic stoppers or with tinkly screwcaps, that’s probably an average average. I’m by no means committed to thinking that screwcaps are necessarily the best answer for wines for ageing - if I were offered the choice of closure for a serious red wine that I bought and intended drinking in ten years, I think I’d go for cork – though a little shamfacedly, perhaps. I’d give a different answer for a short-term aromatic white, though.

When it comes to opening a lot of wines, however, I bless screwcaps. Opening the box of wines from Eaglevlei for example (the winery that starred on TV last year), I was delighted to see that the contents were all under screwcap – for no more noble reason than that it makes opening them (and re-sealing them) such an easy pleasure. No bother with foil-cutters and corkscrews, and then unwinding the cork from the corkscrew to open the next bottle….

And none of the impossibility of trying to re-place one of the sordid lumps of extruded plastic that still seem popular, unfortunately. They seem to swell after just a few moments and then you lose any chance of re-stoppering your wine. But I suppose at least the stuff won’t be corked.

The nicest closures by far, to my mind, are those little glass stoppers (Vino-lok is the trade name) that are still pretty rare. I’m sure they can cause great confusion to a winelover who’s never seen one before and is confronted by the metal seal securing it and requiring removal before the elegant glass stopper is revealed. I’d forgotten that Chamonix uses them for its lower-priced white wines, and because the bottles had standard-seeming capsules over the topes, I was rather bewilderedly readying my corkscrew until I realised. Anyone who’d never seen a closure like this before would sure have been more so.

The Chamonix Blanc was worth any anxiety involved in opening it – a generous, easy, fruity blend of chardonnay, sauvignon blanc & a little chenin at a very reasonable price (though I think its most easily available from the farm in Franschhoek or the restaurant on the property). And once the naked glass stopper was replaced, it looked good – ‘very stylish’, as a visitor said when I showed it to him.

I’ve now embarked on Vergelegen (yes, well, someone has to buckle down to these arduous tasks), and it’s cork all the way – though I don't think that that necessarily reflects the better judgement of winemaker André van Rensburg. Some of the wines are opened and tried once, and will be sampled again a few times over the next few days, just to see what happens to them, as the reds, particularly, tend to be very tight in their youth – I really hate to think of people drinking the top Vergelegens (and many other ambitious wines), both red and white, for at least a few years, preferably longer in some cases.

Learning to love sauvignon (at least a bit) 25 July 2007

Sauvignon blanc has never been a favourite wine of mine – just another instance, I fear, of being out of kilter with the rest of the world. There seem to be two possibilities: either I just don’t understand it ((sauvignon, that is, not the world – there’s no question about that), or that there is extraordinarily little to understand.

Perhaps I am developing, as there are a few that I’ve had in recent years that I have immensely liked: particularly, perhaps, the wooded Reserve from Chamonix (and Vergelegen’s wooded Schaapenberg Auction reserve that I am sad to say they no longer make), and Oak Valley’s Mountain Reserve (the single-vineyard version of their very good standard sauvignon).

During last year’s Platter tasting time I remember that one of the very few bottles that I drank (over a few days) down to the dregs was the Mountain Reserve 2005. I was surprised when I found that happening…. There isn’t a 2006 for tasting this year – though I might say that the Oak Valley Pinot Noir 2006 that I sampled was also one that I made deep inroads into: probably not the ‘best’ local pinot I’ve had for a while, but maybe the one I’ve enjoyed most: extremely delicious.

This difference between ‘best’ and ‘most liked’ is a tricky one that has to be applied if you admit that there are one the one hand objective standards of some kind, and on the other there are your personal tastes. When you’re buying wine for yourself you don’t need to make the distinction, but if you’re trying your best to be fair to wines that you are publicly rating, well, you have to allow for different tastes. If not, I would, for example, have had to either never presume to judge sauvignon blancs, or I would have given them all pretty low scores.

Anyway – I haven’t yet tried the Chamonix, but I seem to have been engulfed in a flood of sauvignon blanc. Nederburg, for example, have five different bottlings: three auction ones, one under the Manor House label, and one the standard. They are all pretty good, I think – fitting in well with my impression that over recent years this label is, under the guidance of Razvan Macici, re-eaning the reputation for quality it used to have and then seemed to lose. It’s a long time since I’ve tasted a whole lot of the Nederburg range, and I was very impressed by the sound quality, and even more by the fact that the wines remain very much within the Cape tradition: these are not over-ripe, sweetish fruitbombs designed for easy gratification; they are proper wines, and it’s a label that deserves more respect than I had realised.

Back to sauvignon
I keep getting away from sauvignon. 2007 seems a good year for the grape, though many of the most ambitious wines are only being bottled around now, which makes for a real problem when it comes to tasting them for Platter. Does the producer give us the next release to taste as a tank sample? Or last year’s finished wine which is almost sold out already?

Much of what I’ve tried falls into the middle ground of decent, unexciting stuff. It seems to me that producers have learnt to be clever in picking and blending – so that there is the exciting green freshness of early-harvested grapes giving the grassy, greenpepper aromas, and then there is also the more tropical fruit character of riper, later-picked sauvignon. Very rarely now, I find, do you get a wine that is exclusively in one of those categories, although of course a wine might tend towards one or the other.

In fact, more than a few producers are now releasing at least two wines to show the difference. I sometimes have my doubts about this practice, as they are invariably more serious wines, and better after a year or two in the bottle – and that maturing, I find, often starts blurring the differences that were clearer before. (I also confess that I suspect the difference is seldom one of terroir, as is often claimed, and more one related to viticultural and cellar practices – although of course different terroirs can encourage different levels of ripening, amongst other factors.)

One winemaker who actually bottles three very serious sauvignons as well as a cheapy is Bartho Eksteen, now making wines from a base at the entrance to the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, under the name Hermanuspieterfontein. It’s an interesting project, in many ways that I can’t go into here – beyond mentioning that the packaging of the wines is excellent: impressive and attractive, but you do have to know Afrikaans to read the back-labels. And that the new reds are also good – though a bit too exuberantly oaky for my taste, at least in their youth.

I tasted the maiden vintages of the sauvignons last year for Platter, and was impressed, and have tasted tank samples of the 2007s, which promise to be at least as good. (I suppose they will be released quite a bit later in the year.) They all of them have some complexity from mixing the green and riper characters – and from some added semillon and nouvelle, but it’s the texture, rich elegance and concentration that sets them above the middle-rank of merely good wines. I do seem to be learning to like sauvignon, with the help of people like Bartho.

A pinotage for Tom 23 July 2007

I dislike that new word: ‘ongoing’. What’s wrong with, for example, ‘continuing’? But somehow ongoing seems more appropriate here, when it’s a question of the large, ever-replenished pile of wine next to what I might call my tasting bench, if I dared to (it’s actually my normal work-table bearing my computer and a lot of mess). ‘Ongoing’ sounds almost like ‘never-ending’ – which is what it sometimes seems like.

But don’t get me wrong (as they say) – I find it an enormous privilege doing these tastings, even if it is occasionally just hard work, and even if the writing up of notes into Excel spreadsheets ranges between tedious and downright difficult. And while there are those who apparently think that tasting for Platter simply involves looking at the label, noting the price and reputation, and giving a corresponding rating – unfortunately it’s not always quite as simple as that. You wouldn’t believe the time and retasting and agonising and second-opinion-seeking that sometimes accompanies the decision to give a wine three-and-a-half stars instead of four, or three….

Pinotage

I gather that the eminent British winewriter Tom Stevenson, for whose annual Wine Report Cathy van Zyl and I write the South African entry, was impressed with the Ashbourne 2004 that we arranged for him to taste last year. (Ashbourne is the straight pinotage made as part of Anthony Hamilton Russell’s little Hemel-en-Aarde Valley empire.) Tom – not on record as a huge admirer of pinotage – open-mindedly wants to try more ‘in this style’.

Oh, I wish….

I myself dither about pinotage, and am not willing to either condemn it or unreservedly praise it as a grape. Apart from the excellent Ashbourne, I tend to mostly like the simpler, fruity, unwooded versions like Beyerskloof’s big-volume one, which I think is one of the great local buys. I’m not doing Beyerskloof for Platter this year, but I am doing Perdeberg (my favourite co-op), which makes two bargains from the variety. The standard (now screwcapped) Pinotage is in that fruitily unpretentious but decent style (though I’d prefer the winery to rely a bit less on cynical residual sugar). And there’s the Reserve, which is more serious (and pretty good), though definitely not marked by the over-wooding, over-extraction and over-ripeness which accompanies some of the Cape’s most ambitious versions.

But one that I’d like to offer to Tom Stevenson, to show him another excellent dimension of what pinotage can offer, is that from Scali (the winery in Voor Paardeberg which formerly was just a supplier of decent stuff to Boland co-op, but now is an integral part of the Charles Back / Eben Sadie-inspired dynamism that is making the Paardeberg area ring with excitement; they also make an excellent Syrah and Blanc – the latter a white blend based on old-vine chenin).

I’ve just tried the Scali Pinotage 2005 (not yet released) which is perhaps even better than the 2004. It blends in a little shiraz, whgich seems to make quite a difference – adding some refinement as well as some perfume.  It’s not exactly elegant wine (which in itself is no criticism) but somehow it reminds one of those categories, as one sniffs happily at its lovely aromas and revels in its gorgeously sweet, generous palate, with big but succulent tannins. While Ashbourne’s model is Bordeaux rather than Barossa Shiraz, Scali’s is more likely to be Châteauneuf du Pape.

Scali is the sort of place that makes one pleased and excited to be a wine critic – and a winedrinker.