Incredibly, the first bottled white wine of the 2006 harvest has already passed my lips – this even as some cool-climate producers have only begun to harvest. Remember the days of the nouveau wines? Well, this was something similar; a very slight white called Light White made by those masters of value for money, Van Loveren.
It’s a semillon (not that it matters much, since you can’t expect too much varietal personality in a wine that must have gone from grape to bottle in the time it takes for you to drive to the farm and back) and it’s called Light White due to its low alcohol (9%) and easy-drinking nature. At around R20 a bottle it’s about right for thoughtless tippling, but don’t keep this for any length of time. A half bottle in my fridge didn’t make it through the night very well.
Altogether on the other end of the spectrum is a 2003 Barbera I tasted the other warm day. Made in California at the Boeger winery, it’s sitting at 16% alcohol and as refreshing as a mouthful of crushed coal. A good friend said he enjoyed it at the winery and surrounds, it goes to show how powerful the halo effect is, you know, how much better the wine often tastes at the winery than at home, because even he admitted it had lost its allure.
By far the most elegant, sophisticated and balanced wine of recent drinking has been the new label Anwilka red, a wine made through a collaboration between Lowell Jooste of Klein Constantia and two blue-blood French producers, Bruno Prats and Hubert de Boüard de Laforest of Chateau Angelus. It’s a shiraz-cabernet blend tasting more of shiraz at this point but one of its most commendable features is the moderate wooding it has been subjected to, only nine months.
A little less ideal is the fact that it is a 2005 vintage wine, about a year earlier than most current red releases. Not to say that it’s not drinking well enough, it’s just that, for a wine retailing at R175, I would expect the producer to hang onto it for at least another year of bottle maturation in ideal conditions. Such an early release hints at lesser quality, then again, they did save nine months of the Cape producer’s standard 18-month wood maturation formula.
This launch was fascinating for another feature: the sight of all the Frenchmen present wearing the outfits so similar so as to suggest an unofficial “casual” uniform – camel coloured chinos, belted, with blue shirts, tucked in. An over-shoulder jersey was optional.
0 Responses to “Anwilka”