Michel Rolland’s Cape flagship, this wine is interesting even before you uncork it. Firstly for it’s idiosyncratic label (a postage stamp) that makes it look like a cheap and cheerful nouveau-style wine rather than a serious red, and secondly for its near 20% pinotage component.
Famous for his technique of softening wines by micro-oxygenation, Rolland is also accused of flattening the wine world by advocating and helping to make wines that would appeal to his personal friend, Robert Parker. In other words, big, bold and ripe wines. He would defend by saying that he wants to make sound and age-able wines from properly ripe grapes with full soft tannins. Wines in a modern style.
The Bonne Nouvelle is certainly plush, with bold fruits and a full, rich body. It also has quite noticeable tannins, almost dusty, that suggest the wine spent a good sojourn in new French oak. Not my style of wine, it’s chunky form blunders rather than cajoles, though it may improve with age. Having said this, at least all the parts are equally powerful, so lovers of heady wines will consider it in balance. Of the pinotage, no evil can be said.
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