Your bank won’t have to lend for many a fine wine blend
Until the late 1970s most Cape winemakers made blended wines because they needed to use up the tanks of their least commercially acceptable varieties.
If they had cabernet sauvignon — or at least enough to meet the liberal requirements of the relatively new wine of origin scheme — they were certainly not going to blend it away. Rustenberg was the only producer that used more cabernet sauvignon than cinsaut in a blend — and then insisted on calling the wine “Dry Red”.
In those not-so-distant days, there were no commercial merlot or cabernet franc vineyards. Then along came Welgemeend and shortly after Meerlust, both with plantings of these classic blending cultivars. Suddenly, a red Bordeaux-style blend was a most desirable purchase. As merlot vines became more readily available (followed by cabernet franc, petit verdot and malbec), there were literally dozens of wouldbe challengers to the throne of Meerlust Rubicon.
In that first decade of Cape Bordeaux blends, the simple availability of juice determined the final composition of the wine. There wasn’t much room for expertise when it came to obtaining the best possible outcome: you wanted as much as you could reasonably produce, because the market was mopping it up. It didn’t matter that we had poor merlot clonal material and that most growers were clueless about the timing required to bring cabernet franc into the cellars at the much-vaunted “optimum ripeness” levels.
That was a generation ago in terms of winemaking and viticulture: now there are generally better clones, greater insight into how to coax the best qualities from the fruit, and how to assemble the varieties to produce a wine that is palpably better than the sum of its parts. Blends are no longer the burial ground of inferior cultivars — but then the upmarket combos (Bordeaux or Rhone) are also no longer guaranteed a sucker market.
We’re seeing more creativity — with some surprising results at prices that don’t oblige wine drinkers to take out a mortgage before visiting their local wine shop. Cilmor estate in Worcester makes a perfectly delicious shiraz, pinotage and malbec blend. The 2021 vintage sells at the cellar door for R135. It came within two points of a gold medal at a recent blind tasting. It has all the fruit notes you would expect, given the components: red fruit, black pepper, sandalwood, whiffs of tobacco.
For way less than this (R65 to be precise) you can buy the Landskroon Paul Hugo 2020 — a blend of cabernet franc, shiraz and merlot. Delicious and remarkably easy to drink, it scored 90 (so a silver medal) tasted blind, suggesting decent enough quality at a remarkably attractive price. Springfield’s Thunderchild Bordeaux blend (proceeds from the sale of which go to support the orphanage in Robertson) is polished and accessible, and comes in under R100 a bottle.
Of course, not all blends are red, though only one white style has achieved the same stature in this market as the most prestigious reds. Unsurprisingly, this is the white Bordeaux blend. First marketed in the 1980s by Michael Trull of La Bri, semillon-sauvignon blanc combos only took off when Vergelegen made an art form of the style in the early 2000s. There are now many very fine examples: the latest Platter guide lists nine five-star laureates.
The Tangram 2018 from Durbanville Hills never made the five-star list — though it was judged one of the world’s 12 top-scoring wines at 2021’s Global Sauvignon Blanc Masters. This is an international competition with entries from New Zealand, Chile, France and the US. On the day it appeared on my tasting bench it was perfectly poised, scoring 95 points — a gold medal/Platter
five-star result. At just more than R200 a bottle, it offers better drinking value than most high-profile red Bordeaux blends.
Was one judging panel /123RF/Igorr
correct and the other wrong? It’s impossible to say. Wine is performance art: some bottles of the same wine show better than others. That’s part of the fun of it.