Is pinotage about to have its big moment?
There is a tide in the affairs of men,” says Brutus to Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” The same is true for grape cultivars, making some more fashionable than others and nudging growers to often disastrous investments as they try to catch the wave.
Consider chenin blanc, once the workhorse white of the Cape wine industry, useful for everything from brandy to sparkling wine, prone to generous yields, condemned once to perpetual ordinariness. No-one in the early 1990s would have had the temerity to suggest that the Western Cape would host the International Chenin Blanc Congress in November 2022. Faced with long-established and prestigious French appellations — Vouvray, Savennieres, Clos de la Coulée de Serrant, Jasnières — who could have imagined that a Stellenbosch wine called Mevrou Kirsten would upstage vineyards whose reputation dates back to the 12th century?
Revisions in reputation are not always in an upward direction. Andre Simon, writing in the 1920s, laments the high price of German rieslings, with the best selling for three times the price of a Bordeaux first growth. Today there are few examples that fetch even half that amount.
Pretty much all cultivars drift in and out of fashion: cinsaut was replaced by merlot, then no-one wanted merlot and everyone started replanting cinsaut; shiraz plantings grew 10-fold in as many years and have since retreated; chardonnay’s reputation has waned and waxed a few times since the early 1980s.
But — and this really is a big “but ”— what about pinotage, the variety so many wine drinkers love to hate? Is it really condemned to remain forever the Cinderella of the Cape wine industry? There have been moments when the achievements of the country’s pinotage producers made it appear as if the limelight beckoned, but then there never seemed to be enough momentum to completely change perceptions.
There’s no obvious reason this should be so. For most of the past 30 years — so for at least one generation of consumers — several of the country’s most prestigious properties have produced a deluxe bottling. Overseas wine judges accord it more respect than some local pundits. US critics in particular enthuse about its fruit weight and flavour intensity. The negatives of the isolation era — hard tannins, green notes, fruit spoilage — have long passed through the pipeline. Instead, the best examples show sumptuous aromatics, fabulous intensity and great textural nuances.
Why has this been such an uphill battle?
I sampled (blind) a Beyerskloof Pinotage Reserve 2019 recently. It garnered 92 points straight up and it sells for under R200. The 2018 vintage clocked in with exactly the same rating. The Hazendal 2017 tasted a few weeks earlier scored 94 points — and is priced accordingly (R380). The Kanonkop CWG also picked up a 94-point rating.
In an endeavour to add gravitas to the image of the variety, six of the Cape’s bestknown pinotage producers, Beyerskloof, Kaapzicht, Kanonkop, L’Avenir, Rijk’s and Simonsig, have each made a separate bottling of their best casks for a project called “Grande Pinotage”. The second edition (2019) of this special selection will come to market late this year. The first series (2018) is pretty much sold out — at R9,000 per six-bottle case. One case has already traded in the secondary market for R30,000. The third series (2020) will be out in about a year from now, with priority in terms of allocations going to buyers who subscribed to the first and second iterations.
Will Grande Pinotage finally change the way domestic wine consumers think about pinotage and help to tilt the narrative to a more confident, more assertive self-identity? It well might, partly because of the quality of what is in the collector’s case, partly because it is the manifestation of a profoundly secure vision. Perhaps, by the time Abraham Perold’s unique crossing of pinot noir and cinsaut attains its centenary in 2025, pinotage will assume its rightful place in the pantheon of world wine.