Pinotage; Standing up and being counted
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
The South African wine fraternity have a few charming customs – and along with saying a prayer or grace before a meal is the habit of standing in respect when drinking a wine that is older than you are.
It’s not often that I find myself up on my hind legs these days… but it happened yesterday. And I was more than happy to rise in honour of Lanzerac’s 1963 Pinotage. The occasion was a very special tasting held in Vermont to mark five decades of South Africa’s homegrown grape. SA’s Pinotage prophet Beyers Truter had thrown open his beach home for the event because it also afforded him the opportunity of diving for a few crayfish before the guests arrived!
A recent report on the WOSA mega tasting in London said that Pinotage was the wine critics’ favoured punchbag – which is very true. It has copped more than its fair share of flak over the years but I’ve always maintained that Pinotage is far from a finished work. It’s like assessing a work of art while the artist is still daubing colours on the canvas! Something that shone through loud and clear is that Pinotage needs time – both for the wine to show its true colours and for further experimentation to show what it’s capable of.
Having tasted Pinotage from the 60′s, 70′s, 80′s, 90′s and finally the 2000′s, it’s apparent how much development has taken place – and how much scope still remains! The issue of coffee Pinotage is (yet again!) a controversial one. No one is prescribing that this is the ultimate expression of the grape, merely that it presents a different option, one being snapped up and glugged down by many.
The wines from the 60′s were surprisingly fresh with ample life still in them. Feedback from ex-Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery production man Duimpie Bayly was that the winemaking and wood maturation of Pinotage was very simple in the 60′s and 70′s; large volume old oak ‘stukvate’ mostly, although Simonsig’s Frans Malan pioneered the use of small new oak barrels for Pinotage simply because it ripened earlier than Cabernet and he didn’t want his expensive barrels sitting around doing nothing!
The 80′s showed obvious freshness and succulence with the 90′s going a step further with overt ripeness and red and black fruit character shining through, along with more obvious use of oak apparent. The wines from 2000 onward display a touch more restraint – in ripeness levels and oaking.
It’s through tastings such as this that lessons are learned. I have to wonder though, how many more of these venerable old bottles remain in good condition and will there be enough around to mark celebrations of six and seven decades of Pinotage? And based on the rapid improvements shown by the last few vintages, where will Pinotage styles be in 10 and 20 years? It’s an exciting prospect and I look forward to future discoveries although I imagine I will have to remain firmly seated in future.