The summary
A solid performance, if not exciting. Although these wines didn’t quite live up to our judges’ high expectations, there is good value to be found, says Tim Atkin MW
EVEN PROFESSIONAL, PALATE-HARDENED tasters look forward to some events more than others. it’s no exaggeration to say that the panel approached this range of stellenbosch Cabernets with lip-smacking excitement. The reason: the 2015 vintage, widely touted as the greatest red wine harvest since 2009, was heavily represented, with 33 of the 64 Cabernet sauvignon and Cabernet-dominated wines on show. Greg sherwood MW and i had tasted a number of these wines sighted in the Cape and were convinced we were in for a treat.
for some reason, it didn’t quite work out that way. it may have been the sweltering weather – a london day that had more in common with the swartland than stellenbosch – or maybe it was just our overwrought
sense of anticipation. We found a handful of very good wines and a bigger number of good ones, but the tasting didn’t shoot the lights out the way we imagined.
What went wrong? John hoskins MW wondered whether we were tasting some wines, especially the 2015s, at the wrong moment in their evolution, caught between the end of a primary fruit stage and the beginning of significant bottle development, between infancy and pimply adolescence as it were.
sherwood rightly pointed out that we were also missing some of the country’s very top wines – paul sauer from Kanonkop, delaire Graff’s laurence Graff reserve, rust en vrede’s single vineyard bottling, stark-Condé’s oude nektar, Tokara’s Telos, Thelema’s
Rabelais and Vergelegen’s V – to name a handful of personal favourites – were all not submitted.
Our criticisms were overripeness, verging on oxidation in some cases, a heavy hand with oak, some brettanomyces and lack of freshness. But maybe we were being a little harsh. Concentration and fruit weight are part of South Africa’s appeal. We shouldn’t expect these wines to taste like Bordeaux. Talking of which, they generally offer considerably better value than wines from the Gironde – one of our 35 Highly Recommended wines retails above £60, but eight can be bought for less than £16, putting them in cru bourgeois or generic Bordeaux territory, price wise. Also on the plus side, very few wines showed the effects of leafroll virus (a combination of overripe and underripe characters).
We may not have found any exceptional wines on this occasion, but the next tier down included a number of famous Stellenbosch Cabernet producers, such as Boekenhoutskloof, Delaire Graff, Glenelly, Hartenberg, Jordan, Rustenberg, Stark-Condé, Thelema, Waterford and Warwick, as well as a few unfamiliar names (at least to me) in Asara, De Kleine Wijn Koöp, Lyngrove, Pella, Super Single Vineyards and Rainbow’s End.
The 2015 vintage had the biggest number of wines in the tasting, but the year that over-performed was arguably 2014, a much cooler, less widely praised vintage that made fresher, lighter wines. There were fewer 2016s in the line-up, largely because many of the Cabernets from that torrid year have yet to be released.
Was there a recognisable Stellenbosch style? Not really. It’s such a big and diverse area, with so much Cabernet in the ground and marked differences in terroir, that this was always going to be a heterogeneous tasting. It was a good one too though, at least in parts. But we all agreed that South Africa’s whites are the country’s stronger suit.
‘The vintage that over-performed was arguably 2014, a much cooler, less widely praised vintage’