43 minute read
south african wine
12 wines with 12 stories
Pieter’s Walser’s BLANKbottle project in South Africa has a reputation for idiosyncratic small-batch wines, each with their own hand-designed label. His avant-garde approach and ‘story-in-a-bottle’ philosophy have struck a chord with the UK’s independent trade.
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He takes a break from the 2022 harvest to talk us through a dozen of his curious creations
It’s vintage time and today Pieter Walser has six presses to organise, and his online banking has just crashed. As is the case in any given year, he has 50 wines on the blocks. Other winemakers might be stressed and tetchy in the circumstances, but Pieter is happy to chat about his idiosyncratic project and the stories behind a dozen of his wines.
BLANKbottle got its name from Pieter’s original policy of abandoning the idea of labels altogether and packaging wines in the wrong-shaped bottles. A police raid made him aware of the legal complications of this free-and-easy approach, and a hefty fine and retrospective tax bill followed.
But by this time, BLANKbottle had established a following, and it wasn’t about to be derailed by the enforced arrival of labels bashed out on Microsoft Word.
“What makes us different, if you like, is that we bottle stories,” says Pieter. “If someone puts a bottle on a table I want it to be almost like a show. I want the label to look amazing, but I don’t want any information on it. It’s just to give people a hint about what’s inside the bottle.
“I want them to experience the wine and then go and find out more about what’s in the wine. All our wines are very much connected to a specific site. The stories about these wines are more human stories, but there are also these geeky wine things.
“My true passion is stories, so if I can communicate those with wines, I’m happy.”
BLANKbottle has no vineyards of its own. “It’s actually not that complicated,” Pieter insists. “We have our own winery, so we have everything under one roof. We’ve
12 wines with 12 stories
got long-term relationships with all the farmers we buy from.
“Look, we make 50 different wines in a year and that is maybe complicated, yes. But it’s easy to sell 50 different wines.
“Harvesting and bottling and logistics are complicated, but our whole system is designed for small volumes. We can’t take in 10 tonnes of a variety because we don’t have a tank for that.
“There’s always something that someone will like within our range. If you have to fly around the world selling the same five wines every year, and you’ve got big volumes of those, that is not an easy job. But if you’ve got 50 different wines that are all in short supply, it goes sort of organically. “It started as fun, it definitely didn’t start as a business, because it is a stupid business model. Making 50 wines just doesn’t make sense on paper. But it’s what we like and it’s who we are, and we can’t actually change that.”
Epileptic Inspiration 2020
RRP £24
Pieter describes this as “a straight Semillon from Elgin”, which doesn’t really do justice to its complex and exotic flavours, or to the life-changing story that led to its creation.
“As a child I could never draw pictures,” he says. “I’m not artistic in any way. Right up until 2012 I did my own labels with Microsoft Word.
“Then in 2012 I started getting epilepsy; I had three big fits. After my third fit I wasn’t allowed to drive and I wasn’t allowed to surf. I sat at the computer to design some labels but the light from the screen bothered me.
“So I started scratching on paper and playing with paint and I designed a label – the first one in my life that I actually liked.
“After that I started designing all my own labels. I wouldn’t say that I’m good at all, but now I lie on a couch with woodcuts, drawings and charcoal and design all my labels myself.
“This label is actually an MRI scan of my brain. Something in my brain changed with the epileptic fits and all that electricity.”
Moment of Silence 2021
RRP £18.95
There’s a poignant story behind the name of this lush Chenin, Chardonnay and Viognier blend that Pieter is not keen to share publicly. But he is happy to chat about a freaky coincidence involving the land it’s from.
“In 2007 I ended up in Wellington, a warm dry area about an hour north from where I live,” he says. “I had no connections there; a friend of mine had invited me. I stopped by at a winery and tasted their wines and looked at their vineyards where they had old Chenin, Chardonnay and Viognier vines. I rented space in their winery before I started my own winery in 2010.”
Pieter’s mother had been researching her Polish roots and discovered that her ancestors arrived in the Cape around 200 years earlier, settling on a certain small farm in Wellington. “I was buying grapes from that specific farm that was owned by my family seven generations ago without even knowing it,” says Pieter. “That’s the reason this wine has been in our portfolio the longest.”
Feature produced in association with BLANKBottle Winery and SWIG
Taste these wines at the SWIG trade tasting Tuesday, May 24 10am – 6pm China Exchange, 32a Gerrard Street, London W1D 6JA
damon@Swig.co.uk
Jan Niemand 2021
RRP £35
This part of Elgin bears a similarity to the Mosel. It’s a steep sandstone slope, with Riesling vines attached to individual poles in the German echalas style. Obviously using the Mosel name was out of the question and so Pieter pays homage by naming the wine after its own river, the Jan Niemand.
But that’s as far as the traditional approach goes. “It’s a super-weird bottle,” Pieter admits. “I don’t ever like to use the traditional bottle. If you put Riesling in a Riesling bottle, people don’t even ask you what the wine is. That we don’t want.”
He adds: “It’s a very small vineyard and we normally make 300 bottles of that wine. But this year we picked four times more grapes so I think we’ll end up with 1,100 litres. We had a good season and lots of rain in winter. But we also changed the pruning system.
“We handled the vine wrong at first, as a bush vine. What we never realised was you need to prune your vine so that the little spurs that carry the grapes are positioned like a spiral staircase around the pole. The bunches are then spread out so none of them touch, there’s aeration, they dry out quickly and they get a lot of sun, so they become really yellow.
“We walk around the vineyard and say to the guys there, ‘where’s your staircase?’”
Orbitofrontal Cortex 2021
RRP £29.50
“My brand is based on having no preconceived ideas but actually, in reality, I do have preconceived ideas towards different producers of grapes,” says Pieter. “That all influences my opinion of wines that are finishing in barrel.” To put this to the test, a team of neuroscientists attached probes to Pieter’s scalp and skin and trained a camera on his face as he blind-tasted 21 samples. “They monitored my subconscious reactions, then went away and drew up graphs, and from there they worked out a blend of the best wines,” he says. “I said to my assistant, ‘we have to have some sort of control wine: is my conscious mind better than my subconscious?’ We pulled out the wines we liked the most and made up a blend, not connected to a particular varietal or area.” It turned out that the “subconscious” wine was totally different to the “conscious” blend, not just in its varietal make-up but in its voluptuous style. It was abandoned, but the winery’s own creation was released as Orbitofrontal Cortex. “That’s the front part of your brain that you make conscious decisions with,” says
Pieter. “The wine is there just to keep the story alive. Every year we make up a blend of whatever we like the most. It can be anything.”
Still, a fascinating experiment. Pieter must have learnt so much.
“Er, no. I learnt absolutely nothing,” he insists. “Actually the experiment wasn’t of much use. You’d have to do it with lots of people. This was only me, so it was only for fun.”
Luuks 2021
RRP £29.50
“This is a straight Chardonnay from Helderberg in Stellenbosch, which is kind of at the back of my winery. When you’re young, you feel you have to travel far to find something nice. I rented some space in Somerset West but had never actually looked at the mountain right behind me.
“Helderberg is known more for Bordeaux varieties but higher up it’s got some really great Chardonnay. I was known for only using older French oak, but that’s because I never had cash to buy new barrels.
“I like Chardonnay in new oak, not 100%, but with a sense of the oak. You can’t actually taste the oak, but it forms part of the palate. So in 2019 I picked that block and bought my first new barrel.
“We destemmed the Chardonnay, pressed it, and the next day we put it into barrel on top of a stack of barrels so everybody could see it. I stepped back and said, ‘this feels like luxury’. In Afrikaans, my first language, luxury is ‘luuks’. So I wrote it on the barrel and it just became the name.”
Kortpad Kaaptoe 2021
RRP £24
The name translates as “the short road to Cape Town”, which is what Pieter once required due to a pressing appointment with the passport office.
On his way, he encountered a field of Fernão Pires in Swartland.
“Fernão Pires is not a variety you see often in South Africa … in fact you don’t see it ever,” says Pieter.
“The farmer said it was an old Portuguese variety that his grandfather got hold of somewhere. Back when the brandy industry was booming in South Africa, they needed high-yielding white varieties for distillation purposes.
“Fernão Pires is very thick skinned and robust against heat and sunlight but eventually most of it was taken out, except one area in Worcester and one in Swartland.
“Look, this is never going to be a five-star wine, but I love it because it’s fragrant and fresh and floral, with a little bit of a Muscat feel to it.”
None of which you’d necessarily divine from the heavy-metal typeface on the label. “The font is based on the AC/DC font, but I did it as a linocut.” “At the time we first made this wine,” Pieter recalls, “there was an article about us saying, ‘how can one winery be a specialist in so many different styles and varieties?’ Because we make anything from everywhere. We just like doing different stuff.”
That sniffy review provided the inspiration for a wine that almost goes out of its way to prove the journalist both right and wrong at the same time.
“We’d just made this blend that didn’t have a real story to it,” Pieter says. “I was chatting with my assistant and saying: it was never my idea to make the best wine in the world. We said from the beginning we want to have fun and we want to be free.
“So we called the wine Master of None, because that is what we are: a jack of all trades.”
It’s almost quicker to list what’s not in this blend than what actually is.
“It’s driven by Grenache, Pinot Noir and Cinsault and there’s also lots of white grapes in there,” says Pieter. “There’s Fernão Pires and Chenin and Chardonnay, and a little bit of Pinotage and Shiraz.”
1-Click Off 2021
RRP £35
“Pinot Noir is something we made for many years, but it never worked,” is Pieter’s honest assessment of his own efforts.
“The first year I made it was 2012. I had a picture in my brain of what it was going to taste like and when we bottled it, it was way off what Pinot was supposed to taste like.
“I called it 2-Clicks Off. If you take a cannon and your aim is two clicks off, you miss the target completely. The wine stayed two clicks off for many years because each year the wine just didn’t taste like Pinot. It was just big; there was too much fruit, and the alcohol was always too high.
“It was also a complicated site because we didn’t have full control over the farming of the vineyard in Elgin. We couldn’t pick on the day we wanted, so the wine always came in slightly more alcoholic than I thought it should be.
“Then about three years ago a new guy bought the farm. We worked out a plan and I employed a viticulturalist to assist him.
“In 2020 it started to get better. 2021 is the closest we’ve ever got to a proper Pinot, so I changed the name to 1-Click Off. I feel we’re pretty close to what we can get from that vineyard.”
Retirement @ 65 2021
RRP £27.50
This 50-50 blend of Cinsault and Shiraz comes from a once-neglected vineyard in Darling.
“I first saw the vineyard in 2016,” says Pieter. “I was told it was a horrible vineyard, planted 64 years ago.” Its original owners had sold the grapes for blending but the site was in a poor state, and now only the resident birds seemed interested in its fruit.
“It’s really hard to find old Cinsault vines like that so I said, if I buy nets to keep the birds out, maybe we can pick something from that vineyard,” explains Pieter.
“We pruned the vineyard a little bit better, and it started growing. Then one Sunday this farmer phoned me and said his sheep had broken through the fence and eaten all the new shoots which were about 30cm long. There was nothing left.
“The next year we netted the vines so they could recover from that. We didn’t harvest anything.
“A fence around the vineyard kept the sheep out, and the nets kept the birds out, and the following year it was the first time anyone had made a vine from a vineyard that was now 65 years old.”
Confessions of a White Glove Chaser 2019 Jaa-Bruu 2021
RRP £27.50
“I’ve got a friend, this really cool English guy, and when he picks up the phone he always says ‘jaa, bru’ which means ‘yes, my brother’,” explains Pieter.
“This Malbec grows on his farm. I knew I would have to call the wine Jaa-Bru because with him it’s the first thing I think about.
“The label is something different – it’s like this screaming mouth. In Afrikaans, the word mal means crazy, and bec is like a slang word for mouth, so in Afrikaans if you say Malbec it means crazy in the mouth. Afrikaans guys pick it up immediately and it’s quite fun.
“It’s all in old French oak. Earlier versions had almost a minty chocolate kind of vibe, but in 2021 we had higher alcohols throughout the cellar and it shows in this wine quite a bit.
“The 2021 is slightly more muscular, but still very fresh.”
RRP £35
Word had got round that a European-backed producer was forensically analysing plots in Helderberg on a mission to create South Africa’s answer to Screaming Eagle, but the project was shrouded in secrecy.
“They started identifying rows that were better than the rest of the plot,” says Pieter. “The farmers had to sign big contracts and were not allowed to tell anybody who was buying their grapes.
“One day I drove past a vineyard where the farm workers were busy picking and they had these white latex gloves on. I realised this must be this secretive fancy winery and I started calling them the White Gloves. “I decided I wanted to invest in Cab so I went to that farm and said, ‘I’d like to buy grapes from you, next to where I saw the White Gloves picking’.” Pieter struck a deal for the fruit on the neighbouring 10 rows, and after noting the distinctive markings on the White Gloves vineyard poles, was able to identify three sites that bordered premium land controlled by the enigmatic Europeans. Similar deals were agreed, and the result is a graceful yet earthy blend of 60% Cabernet Franc and 40% Cabernet Sauvignon. “It’s my confession that I’m a White Glove chaser,” says Pieter, with no obvious sense of shame in his voice.
Familiemoord 2021
RRP £29.50
“Oh my word, this is a long one,” sighs Pieter. “I sort of got accused of killing my son. But I didn’t and he’s not dead.”
To summarise: one Saturday night Pieter raids a large vacant neighbouring property, built on dunes, for sand to create a play pit for his son. Darkness is falling so work isn’t quite finished. Before leaving, Pieter playfully tosses the delighted boy into the hole, where he disappears from sight, and proceeds to cover him in more sand from his spade.
Teenagers lurking in the street naturally assume they are witnessing a murderer burying his victim in a shallow grave, and before long the area is sealed off. It’s not until Monday that Pieter even notices the yellow tape, hears the news about the killing, and realises he’s almost certainly the man the police are looking for.
“It was this huge misunderstanding, and a newspaper wrote a story about the mystery of the boy in the sandpit,” he says. “I wanted to preserve this story for the next generation, so I took an iPhone photo of the newspaper and put it on the label.”
The wine has nothing at all to do with any of this, except for its name, which translates as “family murder”.
“It’s a Grenache,” says Pieter. “We’ve tried different Grenaches over the years, but from the 2021 vintage I think we’ve been on the right track.
“It was the first time we picked from this particular vineyard. We picked slightly later, and it was a warm season, so the grapes were a little bit on the ripe side. But it was the most beautiful Grenache that we could find.”
© Kushnirov Avraham / stockadobe.com
Buitenverwachting wine estate in Constantia
Ribeira Sacra vineyards in Galicia
All wine-producing countries have difficult periods from time to time. All have to deal with the slings and arrows that come with shifts in the weather and climate, politics, economics, consumer fashions and regulations. But few wine industries – at least in peacetime – have had to endure the sheer range of challenges faced by South Africa over the past four years.
The period began at the tail end of three years of an extreme drought that greatly depleted production: the 2019 harvest was the smallest since 2005.
By the time production had got back to something like normal in 2020 (up by 8.2% on 2019) we were … well, we were in 2020, which, while evidently not an easy time for anyone, was particularly hard on South African wine producers.
The severity of Covid-19 in South Africa – by far the highest case numbers and fatalities on the African continent – was matched by the severity of the government’s response. In the period from March 2020 until New Year’s Eve, 2021, when the last set of restrictions was lifted, the South African wine industry had to cope with four separate and complete bans on domestic alcohol sales which, put together with the pandemic-long ban on weekend sales in the off-trade, amounted to several months of lost trading.
This was coupled, in the early days of the pandemic, with an on-off, on-again ban on the transportation of goods to ports. The de facto export ban lasted for five weeks in total, shutting off vital streams of cash flow to businesses already prevented from trading domestically (domestic sales and exports generally account for around 50% each of South African production). It also caused a host of knock-on effects, with producers unable to get their hands on vital materials such as corks, bottles and other dry goods. With ports running at significantly lower capacity even after the ban was lifted (as little as 25% of normal levels), exports were constrained well into the autumn of 2020, since when South Africa has had to contend with the same delays in the global shipping industry as the rest of the world.
At the same time, South African wine has also suffered disproportionately from the effects of successive travel bans imposed by domestic and foreign governments. The industry is unusually reliant on tourists from the UK, the EU and the USA, both in terms of spending money on wineland hospitality, and in spreading the word internationally.
According to industry body VinPro, the
Positive vibes from the Cape
After the turmoil of the past few years, David Williams finds South Africa’s wine industry in ruder health than might have seemed possible in the darkest days of the pandemic
combination of lockdowns and travel bans directly led to a loss of 75,000 tourism jobs in the Western Cape in 2020, with a further 21,000 jobs in the wine industry put “at risk” by the restrictions.
On the way back up
There is no doubt that the turmoil of the past two years has placed enormous strain on the South African wine industry. The loss of domestic sales has been disastrous for those businesses – many of them small, a significant number black-majorityowned – that have yet to build up an export presence. The process of rebuilding and recovery – particularly in the wine tourism and domestic markets – is clearly not going to happen overnight.
However, recent news coming out of the country has been significantly more positive.
The end of all Covid-based restrictions on the sale and export of alcohol accounts for some of the tentative optimism coming out of the Cape at the beginning of 2022. The return of tourists in what remains of the country’s summer tourism high-season, after the relaxation of omicron-inspired restrictions by successive governments, has helped lift the mood.
What’s really helping South African winemakers look forward to the future with a measure of confidence, however, is the resilience of its exports, which have survived and thrived despite the unprecedented conditions.
According to a 2021 export report issued by Wines of South Africa, exports of South African wine grew by 22.1% in volume to 388 million litres, and by 12.1% in value, to R10.2bn (£500m) in 2021. The figures were particularly good for the UK, which, the report said, had “been particularly supportive of South Africa’s wine industry during one of the toughest times it has ever faced”, the support trumping any fears that a combination of Brexit and Covid would create a “negative impact”.
The UK’s imports of packaged South African wine rose by 10% in volume and by a remarkable 25% in value, with independents and “high-end multiple grocers” finding the Cape to be a particularly attractive source of affordable quality wines, at a time when many other countries, in both Europe and the new world, were struggling with rising prices and supply issues.
Other markets that have proved fruitful include China, with the South Africans taking advantage of Australia’s welldocumented trade-war travails in that country, while South Africa was the only new world country to see its exports of packaged wine to the UK in growth.
Bulk wine, meanwhile, had a more than usually important role to play in 2021, helping to fill the vast gap lost by the drastic fall in domestic sales. According to WOSA, total bulk sales rose by 33.6% in volume, and 23.1% in value to 242.6 million litres and R2.4bn (£120m) respectively.
No less important in shaping a more upbeat mood around South Africa is the quality and size of its recent vintages. With the size of 2020 already a significant improvement on the drought-hit 2019, 2021 was seen as the year when the vines seemed to have largely recovered: the crop was up by almost 9%.
Word on the ground is that the quality is also high, among the best in recent memory, which brings us to perhaps the single biggest reason to feel encouraged by the prospects for South African wine in 2022.
Despite everything, the quality revolution that has transformed South African wine in the 21st century has not slowed. The country remains arguably the most exciting and dynamic wine producer in the new world, with a cast of talented adventurous winemakers continually finding new terroirs and stylistic avenues to explore. Making and selling wine in the Cape may have its challenges. But, the prospect of what the best South African winemakers will do with the fruit of one its finest recent vintages is mouthwatering.
Building a South African range
Nine great producers representing the diversity of the Cape, as selected by David Williams
Tammy Nell, David Nieuwoudt and Alex Nell of Cederberg
Cederberg
There’s remote. And then there’s Cederberg Mountain. David Nieudwoudt’s lonely operation, with vineyards from 950 to 1,100m above sea level in the Western Cape, is a model of sustainable, terroirdriven winemaking, the fifth-generation farmer producing wild, beautiful wines, in a wild, beautiful place. His style is all about effortless concentration and highdefinition purity. And if that’s something that Cederberg has in common with other “mountain wines” from Argentina to Trentino, there does seem to be something particularly distinctive in Nieuwoudt’s Cederberg Chenin, Cabernet and Shiraz (and rarities such as Bukettraube), while his Elim side project, Ghost Corner, features the same light touch in a maritime setting. (Bancroft Wines)
Leeu Passant
Chris and Andrea Mullineux were among the original leaders of the Swartland revolution, and are now winemaking royalty in the region’s wine capital Riebeek Kasteel, where their eponymous winery is behind some of Swartland’s most sophisticated, beautifully crafted fine wines. Since 2013, the couple have also been in charge of winemaking at the Leeu Passant estate in Franschoek, which is owned by the Indian businessman (and Mullineux investor) Analjit Singh. Working with old-vine parcels found by star Cape viticulturist Rosa Kreuger, the couple’s Leeu Passant wines are every bit as exciting as their Swartland bottlings, with their sensitive winemaking style uncovering particularly beautiful results from parcels of Cinsault. (Liberty Wines) Iona
Cool-climate is a term that is tossed round a little too easily in South Africa – too often it makes sense only in relative terms for regions that would be considered decidedly warm in Europe. That’s not the case for the genuinely special climate of Andrew Gunn’s Iona. Gunn’s vines are often shrouded in the cool mists created by their position at 450m above sea level, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and the Elgin Valley, protecting them from the direct blare of the sun, slowing down ripening, retaining freshness and creating the clean lines and fine acidic backbone that define Iona’s decidedly restrained, elegant Chardonnay, Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and, in much smaller quantities, Nebbiolo and Syrah. (Alliance Wine)
Lismore Estate
The recent story of Lismore Estate is like the recent story of South African wine in miniature. Having battled to establish, at great personal risk and cost, a fine reputation for producing some of South Africa’s best Syrah, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in her estate far from the mainstream of South African wine in Greyton in the Overberg, Samantha O’Keefe (pictured) saw her house, winery and much of her vineyard wiped out by a fire in 2019. She was saved from disaster by the support, help, grapes and facilities of fellow Cape winemakers, which have helped her to keep the label growing while the estate is rebuilt and replanted. She was able to return to her estate to harvest the 2021 vintage, meaning she’s once again one to watch. (Hallgarten & Novum Wines)
THE WINEMAKER FILES // Jeremy Borg, Painted Wolf Wines
I don’t own my own cellar and I don’t
have any vineyards. I have equipment and barrels and all the things that one needs to make wine. Really the most fundamental part of what I do is cultivating and nurturing relationships with people, and trying to make the people I work with part of the story.
I came out to South Africa in 1993 to see my family and with the intention of
going to Hamilton Russell. But my sister met some people who were running a safari camp in Botswana and they needed a cook and I’m afraid to say that sounded more appealing. It was a very happy thing. It was supposed to be a three-month sabbatical but it ended up being two years. Emma and I got married there and on our wedding day, we made a vow that we would do something to help conservation.
At the end of 1996 I was employed as
an assistant winemaker at Fairview, but when I arrived it turned out Charles [Back] didn’t need an assistant winemaker but a Boy Friday type of a guy. I got incredible on-the-job training from this experience and I was there for about eight years. It stood me in incredibly good stead when I started doing my own thing.
My friend was doing some accounting for a guy called Alain Moueix, part of
the family from Château Petrus. He had some Bordeaux varietals and also some Shiraz and some Tinta Amarela, which is one of those weird ones. They didn’t need the grapes and I was asked if I wanted to buy them. The first wine I made got stolen but the insurance paid out immediately, so I had enough money for the second vintage.
Most of the obvious South African conservation ideas had been registered.
Once we got hooked up with the African wild dogs I realised they would provide me with the template to write a business plan.
The wild dogs operate in a pack
structure and are very effective. They are led by an alpha female, which is unusual. They’re funky and weird and much maligned. They are very rare, probably only 500 adult dogs in South Africa.
I don’t work with the same varieties
every year. For whites I vinify Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin, Roussanne and Viognier. I share a cellar with Chris Williams and he makes wonderful Grenache Blanc and sometimes he has more than he needs, so I buy some for blending. For reds I vinify Pinotage and a parcel of Rhône varietals: Shiraz, Grenache, Carignan and Mourvèdre.
I change my winemaking practices and strategies according to the conditions.
My first choice is to ferment with wild yeast. I’m an unapologetic user of tartaric acid. I like wines that have low pH and have tightness and focus. I like to work as naturally as is reasonable.
The ability to work like this comes I
think from having been a chef. You have
Jeremy Borg is a former chef who once worked at the Hampton Hill branch of Oddbins and has a diploma in wine business from Adelaide University.
Working with growers in Swartland, Paarl and Stellenbosch, he relies on the generosity of friends for the space needed to create his Painted Wolf wines, which raise funds for wildlife conservation.
Painted Wolf wines are imported into the UK by North South Wines 020 3871 9210 www.northsouthwines.co.uk
to think on your feet and you have a lot of things going on that you have to manage or fix. I have a really enjoyable time, I love doing this, though I have to confess I would probably make better wine if I didn’t have to deal with all the complexity and was in just one space and not sharing equipment. But it wouldn’t be so much fun.
The Den Chenin Blanc
RRP: £10.49
It’s warm climate Chenin. We harvest a portion at low sugar and do a very clean ferment in stainless, and a much riper portion to give that more textured character. The current vintage in the UK market, 2021, has grapes from a heritage vineyard planted in 1974. It’s a really commercially successful style.
Guillermo Pinotage
RRP: £16.99
A perfect fit with the image of the wild dog is the equally maligned Pinotage. The 20ha organically certified vineyard is super sought after. It produces Pinotage with a really distinctive Rhône feel to it. We vinify it in a very traditional way, small open ferment, hand punched, and I blend some Rhône varietals in as well.
Solo Roussanne
RRP: £16.99
Contrary to what a lot of people say, South Africa is a warm viticulture country. I want to be here in 20 or 30 years' time and it made sense to me to work with varietals that can cope with warmer conditions. The wine has great beauty, a freshness and vibrancy. Because it's a little bit unusual it has traction in the marketplace.
Kanonkop
In the past decade, coverage of South African wine has largely focused on the country’s new wave: the younger, independent producers who broke away from the sometimes staid and stolid traditional estates to found their own small, experimental projects. As important as their role has been in creating the buzz around South Africa, they shouldn’t overshadow the continued relevance of some of the Cape’s older, more classic names. With a first vintage in 1973, Stellenbosch’s Kanonkop is by no means the oldest of the Cape’s wine estates. But its immaculate, ageworthy Bordeauxstyle wines, and its ability to make
Pinotage of first-growth standard, mean it is still very much one of the best. (Seckford Wine Agencies)
Waterkloof
As the founder of one of the UK’s bestloved and most successful wine importers, Paul Boutinot’s career in wine would have been remarkable enough even if his search for a “new classic” winemaking terroir, which began in the early 1990s, had come up empty-handed. The subsequent success of the wines he produced from the terroir he found high up on the slopes of the Schapenberg from 2004 onwards is almost enough to eclipse his earlier achievements. Farmed organically since 2008, the various ranges and price points are marked by pristine fruit and definition, whether it’s the affordable drinkability of Seriously Cool Cinsault or the fresh, layered complexity of the Circle of Life red and white blends. (Boutinot)
Scions of Sinai
A relatively new arrival on the Cape scene, Sons of Sinai is nonetheless the work of someone with deep roots in South African country not short of them over the past decade. Walser owns no vineyards. And there’s very little continuity between vintages: you never know what he’s going to produce, or how many different cuvées, or how much of them. It all depends on what he finds as he scours the winelands for parcels of old vines. So far he’s worked with something in the region of 70 different sites. The results are unpredictable, but always worth tasting, and often remarkable. (Swig)
wine. Bernhard Brendell was born and raised on a wine farm near Stellenbosch. His own project is very much in the new wave, natural-adjacent, low-intervention mode, and they are beautiful examples of the breed, based on fruit sourced from parcels of dry-farmed old vines across the Lower Helderberg, plus a single site on the remote edges of Klein Karoo. Highlights include ethereal – yes really – Pinotage and Pinotage/Cinsault blends, and intense, complex Grenache Blanc. (Indigo)
Pieter Walser
The BLANKbottle Winery
On paper it shouldn’t work. But somehow Pieter Walser’s unique and apparently haphazard approach to winemaking has produced some of the finest, most memorable bottles to emerge from a
Delaire Graff
Established in 2003, Delaire Graff began its life at around the same time as the surfer-dude-old-vine model was beginning to coalesce around Eben Sadie and his acolytes. But the billionaire British jeweller Laurence Graff – founder of Graff Diamonds – had a different approach in mind: a no-expense-spared attempt to found a new fine wine estate alongside five-star hospitality, an art museum, a spa, and several restaurants in a spectacular setting on the slopes of Botmaskop Mountain in Stellenbosch. It’s a site that’s proved just as hospitable to grapes as high-end tourists, with winemaker Morné Vray producing a range of highly polished, sophisticated wines from the Bordeaux varieties and Chardonnay. (Armit)
Morné Vray of Delaire Graff
. THE DRAYMAN .
Bringing flavour to the table
It’s worth taking a fresh look at modern interpretations of a beer style where alcohol is kept in check, but personality certainly is not
This month’s Drayman comes with a bit more oomph than last time round’s look at no- and low-alcohol – about 2%-3% more in fact. Table beer is one of those modern trends that turns out to be not really that modern at all, though contemporary iterations bear little resemblance to those that coined the term in medieval times. Then it was a light in alcohol, maltheavy, porridge-like brew consumed communally while dining, as the name suggests.
It was codified to some extent in the late 18th century when it became one of three taxable tiers of beer, ranked according to alcohol content between strong beer and small beer.
When the table beer classification was removed in the 1800s the name went out of fashion, only to be resurrected in the craft beer boom of the 21st century as a handy catch-all term for brews that fall in the gap between low-alcohol at sub-1% abv and genuine session beers at 4% or more.
In the US, it’s been applied to a spectrum from 3%-ish variations of Belgian saisons to Irish stouts, but in the UK the table beer naming convention has mostly settled around lighter alternatives to IPAs and session pale ales, the favoured contemporary styles of the majority of discerning beer drinkers.
These are table beers that allow comfortable midweek consumption of two or three pints, delivering alcoholic relaxation and the falling away of inhibitions without the sleep disruption or hangover.
A pioneer of the modern trend, and still perhaps its greatest example, is London IPA specialist Kernel’s Table Beer, currently selling at 2.8% abv, though the strength can vary a little with each batch. The hop bill changes too, bringing subtle changes in flavour profile, but there’s a definite house style: spicy hops and refreshingly clean. It is, if it’s not too bold a claim, a modern classic. Manchester’s Cloudwater, also best known as an IPA heavyweight, strikes a balance between body, quaffability and tropical/citrus hop power with the 3.2% And Relax table beer. From the same city, Track’s Tuya table beer similarly punches above its 3% weight. London’s Pressure Drop pushes the top end of the table beer strength spectrum with the 3.6% Just You Wait, the name a fair indication of how its punchy hop intensity might exceed first-timers’ expectations. Northern Monk in Leeds favours the description “hazy light IPA” rather than table beer for its 2.8% abv Striding Edge, named after a ridge in the hills of the
Lake District, beautifully illustrated below, but it does the same job with its fresh piney hop oil flavour.
The 3% Tail Crush, from Burning Sky, has got the hop intensity of its peers, and the use of wheat and oats in the malt bill backs up the flavour hit by providing extra body – a detail that brings us full circle back to table beer’s porridge-y origins.
My dad phones me late when I’m collating the numbers for the week in the office downstairs. It is very dark and cold and the screeching heater is screeching and making it difficult to find the £47 discrepancy from Tuesday.
Are you at work? He says.
Yes, I say.
We should meet for lunch this week! He
says.
Well I have a voucher for my favourite restaurant, I say.
I immediately regret this because I remember that my dad has a limited sense of taste and smell (not Covid!) and I do not want to waste my free Amazing Lunch on my dear, Jam Shed swilling father. I have been bringing fantastic bits of cheese and wine to him for years and it wasn’t until Christmas just gone that he said he hadn’t been able to taste anything for “some time now”. I always just thought he was unimpressed by my homecoming gifts. Sad, too, that he is owner of a magnificent, massive beak that just goes to show. Or doesn’t.
Right then, Tuesday, he says, I will come through on the bus, it’s free.
Where is the restaurant in relation to the bus station, he says very early the next morning, waking me from a dream about a new sink that we put in the shop which meant no one could access the till.
It’s in Finnieston, one of the Coolest it ever since. He also loves picnics, thermos and kitchen roll neat in a bag and violent sandwiches seasoned with mustard or horseradish that burn your mouth in the way that a flavour might. We meet at Edinburgh Park station which is counterintuitively not a place you can park. The park in question is one of those “Lizard Parks” with the Costa DriveThru and a whole bunch of empty office parks and some twigs in the shape of trees.
We get an angry beef and horseradish sandwich, a party platter of sushi and a yellow label Bleu d’Affinois. I decide against the can of Mojito. We drive the considerable distance to Arthur’s Seat where dad lets slip he’s “not been terribly well, recently” and I counter with babbling inconsequential shite because if he’s going to give me the Cancer Talk, which indeed he does, I want to be somewhere beautiful to receive it, not in a traffic jam on the Pleasance.
The view from Arthur’s Seat is amazing, the sky and the Forth almost exactly the same shade of blue and I wish I’d bought the can of Mojito for the picnic. A man with roller-skis passes us twice. We leave the blue side and my dad says there’s no parking space on the other side but it’s his favourite bit so we drive very slowly round the corner and Edinburgh is laid out in front of us, goldtipped, sun-bathed. I look at my dad and he is happy and full of horseradish.
17. HAPPY HORSERADISH
Phoebe Weller of Valhalla’s Goat in Glasgow spends some important quality time with her dad
Neighbourhoods in the World (2016), I say in my impressive I’ve-been-awake-forhours! voice that I can do first thing in the morning.
I could get a taxi from the bus station, he says.
You could. It would be about eight quid.
There is a sharp intake of breath, a pause.
Or I could come and meet you from the bus station and take you on another bus.
Another pause.
Or I could meet you halfway in Edinburgh and we could get a picnic.
Oh that would be nice, he says.
He loves Edinburgh, fell in love with it when he came to art college there in the late 50s from the West Midlands, has loved
Aveine smart wine aerator
From the French wine tech specialist Aveine, this gadget is designed for the impatient.
Place the aerator over the opened bottle of wine and scan the bottle.
The accompanying app, which has a database of over 90,000 wines, will determine the right amount of aeration required for a particular wine and mimic the oxygenation time in an instant, meaning you can simply pour straight to glass.
See aveine.eu/en for more information. Priced from £350, available at Selfridges and Amazon.
Pulpsafe transit packaging
WBC has extended its Pulpsafe range to include two-bottle and four-bottle options. The best-selling eco-range of transit packaging for bottles and cans is made in the UK and is 100% recyclable, compostable and biodegradable.
Quick and easy to use, the Pulpsafe packaging provides more stability in transit and both inner and outers are available from stock and delivered next day. Bulk buy discounts are available. Free delivery over £150 excluding VAT. No minimum order. wbc.co.uk/pulpsafe
RHUBARB & STRAWBERRY MARGARITA
In these Pornstar Martini-times, it was a little surprising to see the Margarita named as the world’s favourite cocktail by Fentimans, whose methods included counting Instagram and Tik Tok hashtags, Google search data and using “a Twitter sentiment analysis tool”. The joy of the Margarita is its versatility; it can be adapted for any season, occasion or personal taste preference. This rhubarb-led version celebrates spring and nods to trends for rhubarb-flavoured spirits and pink drinks.
2cm of rhubarb Three strawberries 5cl white tequila 2cl triple sec 2cl lime juice 1cl Campari
Coat the rim of the cocktail glass with the crushed salt. Muddle the rhubarb and strawberries in a cocktail shaker. Add ice and the liquid ingredients. Shake vigorously and strain into the glass. Garnish with a trimmed mini stick of rhubarb.
CHEERS FOR CHIVITE
The Navarra producer has been family owned for almost four centuries but the business has never rested on its laurels. Our panel of independents was impressed by the Las Fincas range and the singlevineyard Legardeta wines, which show a finesse and complexity that makes them perfect for food.
Feature produced in association with Enotria&Coe. Visit enotriacoe.com for more information or call 020 8961 5161
The Navarra family wine producer Chivite traces its history through 11 generations and 375 years. Its wines are consistently highly rated by some of the world’s most influential wine writers, and loved by the Spanish monarchy, which has included them in the wine lists of royal weddings and state visits.
Julián Chivite Marco – grandfather of current executive president Julián Chivite – founded the Consejo Regulador of the Navarra DO in north west Spain, and instigated a jump in wine quality in 1993 when he employed Denis Dubourdieu, consultant to Bordeaux’s Château d’Yquem and Château Cheval Blanc.
Julián Chivite
The wine only has two or three hours of skin contact to obtain this colour. Then we keep it for six months on the lees for complexity and character
This led to the creation of the Legardeta vineyard, which makes Chivite’s single-estate wines to this day.
Present-day export manager Patrice Lesclaux says: “He decided to create competition in the vineyard, planting 6,000 vines per hectare in poor soil, forcing the vines to grow vertically and quickly, so that they have the freshness and minerality that is characteristic of Chivite.”
Only around 103ha of the 245ha property is planted with vines, mainly Tempranillo, Chardonnay, Syrah and Garnacha, in many small plots of different soil types and orientations. The cool climate – for Spain – is influenced by its position in the foothills of the Pyrenees, relatively close to the sea, preventing overripeness and encouraging uniform bunch and grape sizes.
The Colección 125 range is Chivite’s flagship but a Zoom tasting for readers of The Wine Merchant, led by current boss Julián Chivite, focused on wines from its Las Fincas and Legardeta portfolios, kicking off with a rosé that helped change perceptions of pink wines from Spain.
Chivite Las Fincas Rosé 2020 (RRP £17.95)
This was created in partnership with Juan Mari, chef of the three Michelin-starred Arzak restaurant in San Sebastián, and is an attempt to create a “gastronomic rosé” to rank alongside the best that Provence has to offer.
“After three trial vintages we went to market with this wine,” says Julián. “It’s a very pale wine and we were the first in Spain to vinify with this style and colour.
“You have to take a lot of care because the grapes are very delicate. The wine has only two to three hours
of skin contact just to obtain this colour. Then we keep it for six months on the lees and that gives the wine more complexity and character.
“It’s full-bodied and with good length, with a very pale colour, but with intensity and power on the palate. There is cherry and strawberry, but also a lot of white fruit like peach.”
Abbi Moreno at Flora Fine Wines in London describes it as “a great food rosé with lots of character”, while Jane Taylor, of Dronfield Wine World in Derbyshire, says it is “very elegant and pure”.
Las Fincas Blanco Dos Garnachas 2019 (RRP £16.65)
The first of two whites in the tasting was a 50-50 blend of white and red Garnacha, that comes in a black bottle – the contrast between wine colour and glass colour intended to reflect the unusual varietal mix.
“Dos Garnachas is a wine with a powerful and lively character,” says Julián.
Lesclaux adds: “The acidity and balance is still present after three years. That’s interesting for Garnacha which is a very oxidative grape, but it shows this is a wine you can keep.”
Aimee Davies, of Aimee’s Wine House in Bristol, says: “The Dos Garnachas white was a standout wine for me; I was particularly impressed with how clean it tasted. Amazing wine.”
Legardeta Chardonnay 2021 (RRP £16.65)
This is a 100% varietal that Jancis Robinson once described as the “Chablis of Spain”.
Julián Chivite says: “It is a rich Chardonnay, with the influence of the Atlantic climate making it very fine and
complex. We harvest in the first 15 days of September, which is not normal for white wines in northern Spain.
“Usually we are the last to finish the Chardonnay harvest, and that is very important for complexity and acidity. The ageing potential of these wines is fantastic. Our Colección 125 is now on the 2007 vintage, which is unusual in Spain for white wines.”
Abbi Moreno liked “the integration of fruit and oak on the Chardonnay”, adding: “I just automatically associate Chardonnay with Navarra and Chivite.”
Legardeta Garnacha 2018 (RRP £17.95)
The only red in the tasting has a style influenced by the fact that the Legardeta vineyard in Navarra is “very similar to the climate of Rhône,” says Julián.
He adds: “It is medium-coloured with ruby intensity. There’s a lot of fruit with dominance of strawberries, which makes it a very easy-to-drink wine, but with a texture that envelops the palate.
“It is very elegant, with an acidity that is a common factor in all of the wines from this vineyard, and is very important for ageing and freshness. Many years ago reds from here would have been very over-mature and heavy.”
Lesclaux adds: “Legardeta Garnacha can be paired with many tapas foods, mild ham, mild cheese, or even lamb. It’s a very versatile wine that certainly could also do very well as a by-the glass wine.
“Because the terroir and the poor soil means the vines are in a struggle, and have been since the beginning, the grapes are small. That gives elegance because we mix minerality and freshness with body. This is the beauty of Chivite; they are gastronomic wines.”
