examples are made.
Petite Sirah is officially known as Durif, and exists only in some small plantings made by Charles Back at Fairview and Spice Route. Back is a great believer in the future of Petite Sirah in the Cape, and it would be foolhardy to disagree with the assessment of such a man.
ITALIAN VARIETIES
One might have expected South African interest in Sangiovese, and even more in the varieties of the southern Italian mainland and Sicily, but official indifference and widespread ignorance have dictated otherwise in the past. Difficulties and delays in importing stock are still a deterrent, but interest in the grapes of Italy is growing, and Sangiovese, with 61 hectares in 2011—a huge increase since 1996—is making a modest showing: there are half a dozen varietal examples, and some blends. On a smaller scale, the same is true of the Piedmont-based varieties Nebbiolo and Barbera. Strangely, considering the climatic difference involved as well as the notorious difficulty of succeeding elsewhere with the grape, Nebbiolo was mentioned in Perold’s 1926 treatise as doing well in warmer sites in the Cape, but little seems to have been known of it subsequently until it became the first of the Italian varieties to appear on a label here: that of Steenberg in the late 1990s. Steenberg Nebbiolo is now becoming increasingly convincing. The few local producers of Italian extraction have understandably shown interest in making wines from these grapes, but unfortunately the examples from Idiom and Morgenster have generally been subjected to overripeness, precluding them from serious interest. There is also a minor but interesting fashion to blend the three available Italian varieties together in serious wines, which can work very well for Nederburg Ingenuity and for Bouchard Finlayson Hannibal (which contrives to include also Pinot Noir and Syrah). Zinfandel/Primitivo, which has been planted in a small way in the Cape for many decades, has never aroused much interest—although Blaauwklippen has made it something of a feature of its range—and now seems to be on the decline, even while other Italians are prospering.
PORTUGUESE AND SPANISH VARIETIES
As with Italian, the lack of penetration by Spanish and Portuguese varieties is unfortunate to the point of being scandalous in light of similarities of climate and conditions—that is, leaving aside Garnacha and Monastrell, Spaniards that entered the country with French passports. And various port varieties have been here for some time and are increasingly being used for table wines as well as fortified ones, especially by the port producers of the Klein Karoo. Tinta Barocca (the official misspelling of Tinta Barroca) is by far the most extensively planted of them, although it had just 221 hectares in 2011, which is in fact a big decrease from 1996’s figure, while the plantings of the finest variety, Touriga Nacional, has quadrupled to 87 hectares in the same period. Eben Sadie is now making a wine from old Tinta Barroca vines, which is bound to increase interest. Other port varieties are grown in a small way, including Tempranillo/Tinta Roriz and Tinta Amarela/Trincadeira.
OTHER BLACK GRAPES
Pinotage
Whether South Africa’s “own” grape is ever to provide a unique selling point is surely starting to seem doubtful to even its greatest admirers. While varietal Pinotage and Pinotage-charactered blends do reasonably well in the international market, as they do at home, and a rare few are even lauded, the grape continues to have its implacable detractors, both locally and internationally. There are, of course, many passionate defenders and advocates of Pinotage—but as they are mostly local, there is often some discernible element of self-interest or of patriotic stirrings. Yet Pinotage makes enough good wines to establish that it is certainly not “vile” (as British writer Jamie Goode once called it).
The variety dates to 1924, when Professor Perold successfully crossed Pinot Noir and Cinsaut. The latter grape was known in South Africa at the time as Hermitage, hence the second part of the portmanteau name later given to the cross. Perold, one story has it, planted four seeds in the flower garden of his university-owned house. Two years later he left the university and in 1928 a young lecturer rescued the young plants from a team clearing the garden and took them to Professor Theron at Elsenburg Agricultural College. It is possible that Theron knew about the seedlings if they had, rather, been planted at the university’s Welgevallen Experimental Farm. Different accounts persist (Pinotage’s most thorough historian, Peter F. May, has been unable to resolve the discrepancies). The young plants were grafted onto rootstocks in either 1932 or 1935 by Theron, who proceeded to evaluate the new variety. He and Perold then selected the strongest of the young plants for propagation and gave it its name (“Herminot” was a possibility, too).
In 1941 the first wine from Pinotage was made at the small Welgevallen winery by C.T. de Waal. The first commercial plantings seem to have been near Somerset West in 1943. But in 1953, Bellevue and Kanonkop also planted this unknown new variety. In 1959 a Bellevue wine made from Pinotage was named best wine at the Cape Young Wine Show. The wine was marketed in 1961 by Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery under the Lanzerac brand, the first label to carry the new variety’s name.
Since then, the grape has inevitably had its vicissitudes in terms of producer and consumer popularity. The grape was viticulturally undemanding, and quite widely planted during the 1960s. It came to occupy about 2 percent of the vineyard, but by the early 1990s its hectarage had grown little and it was the second-cheapest red grape in South Africa. The mid-1990s wave of international enthusiasm or curiosity about South African wine added impetus to Pinotage. It seemed an omen when a Kanonkop Pinotage received the Robert Mondavi Award as the best red wine at the 1991 International Wine and Spirits Competition in London. Prices for Pinotage grapes rose dramatically through the 1990s and so did plantings, which reached a high point in 2001 when Pinotage occupied 7.3 percent of the national vineyard. But thereafter plantings fell away (as prices dropped even more than for most other red varieties), and its relative status plummeted. By 2011 its share was down to 6.5 percent. We can presume that this is not the end of the story in the fashionability or otherwise of Pinotage.
Pinotage is grown widely around the Cape, with most of it in Stellenbosch, Paarl, and Swartland. What does seem clear is that the best wines come off older, dryland bushvines—and there are, in fact, still a number of producing vineyards dating from the 1960s; although, as the notable result of such conditions is comparatively low-yielding vines, this is perhaps the essential reason for the higher quality. Such vineyards are mainly responsible for fine Pinotages from, for example, the Kanonkop, Meerendal, and DeWaal estates.
No doubt Perold’s hopes were that his cross would have the inherent greatness of Pinot Noir combined with Cinsaut’s prolific ease and tolerance of hot days. But strange things emerge in such processes, of course—who would have imagined, for example, that two grapes that tended to produce light-colored wines would merge to produce a grape giving deep color? As to the elegance and finesse characteristic of good Pinot Noir, few would claim that these number among Pinotage’s virtues, although there certainly are some more lightly made Pinotages with a perfume and grace that recall this side of the grape’s origins, and after the best versions have been ten years or so in bottle, its noble ancestry seems by no means implausible. Many have aged well: tasted in 2010, the Lanzerac 1963 was splendid, lively and fresh with not too much grip and deep, lingering fruit. More recent wines than that, notably Kanonkops, have also shown the ability to mature beneficially over a decade or more.
The problems? There are indeed a few, though it must be stressed that as viticulturists and especially winemakers have learned to deal with the grape these are encountered increasingly rarely. Judicious winemaking reduces to a whisper the sweet acetone pungency (deriving from isoamyl acetate), and the trace—or more—of bitterness that emerged in the 1990s particularly is now rarer, and often even attractive when at a very low level. Pinotage is prone to deliver big tannins, a characteristic exacerbated by the overoaking inflicted by some ambitious winemakers. In fact, there is perhaps more ambition around than a lot of Pinotage can take, and too much patriotic anxiety also, as well as “cultural cringe.” Without at all decrying the very good Pinotage wines made by
