handtomouth

For a paper on cloned foodstuffs that my brother is presenting at a conference in New Orleans later this week, see here.

The Perdeberg lies between Wellington and Riebeeck Kasteel, named after the zebras that used to roam here. Many of the vineyards are now of great age (in the Cape that’s 50+ years) because the small mixed agriculture farmers planted white varieties for distillation rebates and it so happened that these farmers never pulled these old vines out – while the rest of the Cape’s vineyards were rapidly replanted in the commercialisation that began in the 1990s. The combination of rare old vine stock and the Perdeberg’s naturally granitic soils has resulted in an area of undeniable excitement for a new wave of winemakers.

Leading the new wave with confident energy and now world-famous wines is Eben Sadie, who makes his Palladius white blend solely from Perdeberg grapes. A good portion of his red blend, Columella (the 2005 was the highest rated South Africa wine ever in US Wine Spectator magazine), also comes from these slopes. For Sadie, a good wine is assessed by its structure, not its obvious fruit. The Perdeberg vines, with their age, give him this structure in spades, and their granitic composition preserves the natural acidity of the grape – and natural acidity is far superior to added acidity for a wine’s balance.
The Palladius 2006 comes across as a beguilingly soft wine, but its lingering persistence and mineral heart give you an idea of what role provenance can play in making individualistic wine. It’s a solid wine without being at all hard, and its consistency in the palate is fantastic. Difficult to find, expect to pay around R349 in fine wine shops. If Palladius is unavailable, get hold of some of his Sequillo 2006 white (R165). Again a white blend from the same soils, this time lower on the slopes, the result is a more accessible style of wine.

Other wines to seek out are the Lammershoek Roulette 2005, a blend of Shiraz, Carignan, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Viognier that packs a sophisticated punch and the Black Rock White 2006. The latter is made from old vines; it’s an intense blend of Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay and a little Viognier. On the reds, the Scali Syrah 2005 is herbal and lithe and even though it carries the structure of the area, this wine proves that Shiraz does not have to be fruit soup. Vondeling Baldrick Shiraz 2007 is a lightly wooded wine with an exuberantly spicy palate that’s fresh and delicious. If famous brands are your game, the David Frost Par Excellence 2003 is a modern wine of great intensity, still very much in its youth. Contact (021) 869 8655 or visit www.voorpaardeberg.co.za for more on these wines.

No theme to this column today, but a wandering through some of the wine experiences I’ve recently had. Always been a fan of Solms Delta for their idiosyncratic approach (you may recall the vine-dried or “desiccated” wines they make) and the fact that they have a fantastic on-site museum that explains the human side of our wine heritage. Now they are establishing a museum of music, a collaborative project with Richard Astor, whose farm is next door.

They’ve also started a harvest festival in the roots sense, where music and merriment replace commerce, uptight music and desultory picnic baskets. At the first one, the new Solms-Astor wines were launched. There’s a white blend, a red blend and a curious pétillant Shiraz. The blends are great table wines, easy-drinking but not simple, and lovely for the fact that they are dry wines without residual sweetness. They also have great names, the white called Vastrap, the red Langarm, and the 2007 vintages sell for R46 each. And if you are generally bored with clichéd back label blurb, check these out.

Another wine that makes good, lively drinking without being OTT is the Elgin Vintners Shiraz 2006. It’s got good spice notes, lots of fruit but also a tangy quality that refreshes. Only problem for me is the R78 price tag, I think this is more of a R60 wine.

Been launching into some older wines recently, opened the 2001 Delheim Vera Cruz Shiraz alongside their 2001 Grand Reserve. 2001 was a good vintage, and seven years should show these wines in a great light. This was true for the delicious Grand Reserve which has integrated beautifully and is really a polished wine – but less for the Vera Cruz which is tired and somewhat flabby. It’s still my opinion that the modern Cape makes Cabernets and Cab blends that age well, but have not yet cracked the code on Shiraz.

Of course, I say modern Cape because we now make wines that are easier to drink in their youth, and are less likely to age as well as the Cape reds made in the 1970s and 1980s. When you taste a 1974 Fairview Pinotage that’s still a lively, delightful wine today, you really appreciate this. In its youth, I heard from current winemaker Anthony de Jager, it was an austere, rather forbidding wine, with firm tannins. When last have you tasted a Cape wine that sounds at all like this today?

So I said no theme, but I have come back to a recurring feeling I have that our modern reds, for all the back label promises, are ill-equipped to mature (in the sense of improving) for longer than six to eight years. Whether this is actually a bad thing is debatable.

Seth Godin writes about the banality of mother’s day and sweetly pays homage, something I can relate to with the passing of mine.

Should chef like Heston Blumenthal be bothering with burgers? The Blumenburger?! It will take you more than a day to make, and that’s not talking about the fries…

Eric Asimov has written an interesting take on Californian wines, he calls them “imitation” wines. The parallels to SA are not too obscure…

The other day I was invited by a wine import company called Great Domaines to a tasting of the Burgundies of Jean-Marie Fourrier, a fourth generation wine-maker from this favourite wine region of mine. Mr Fourrier is an engaging man, with lovely wines to boot, but since the 2005 vintages that we tasted are completely unavailable to purchase from Great Domaines (you could aim for the acclaimed 2006 vintage if you contact www.greatdomaines.co.za), I won’t bother to write about them.

Fourrier is returning to his roots. For a region that is already pretty fixed on tradition, this is something. He grows his vines without the use of any chemical fertilisers, and never uses vine stock treated for disease resistance or high yield. It’s about respect for the natural order. He waits until a vine is 30 years old before he uses its grapes to make Domaine Fourrier wine, until then he considers them immature. Aside from the fact that plant virus wrecks many of our vines within 20 years, our growers also have little tolerance for a plant with the small yields of an older vine. For most of them, it’s about quantity more than quality.

Fourrier then makes his wines using as little new wood as possible – no more than 20%. He has a number of reasons for this. In terms of wine quality, he states that “oak is for the slow breathing of the wine, not for taste.” He is after fruit purity, not barrel flavour. Again, consider the local model. Almost every producer chasing high quality “treats” the wine to 80-100% new wood. “Treats” means both an indulgence and a treatment, for the powerful flavour that oak imparts is one that we, the consumer, now think is the taste of fine wine.

But consider the other meaning of “treat”. New French oak, or any oak, is a dwindling global commodity. To use new oak, the prime staves from an old, slow-growing tree, primarily to flavour a wine, and then next year to ship another few hundred new ones in, for their flavour, is supremely wasteful – even arrogant. As supply dwindles, the luxury will dissolve anyway, so expect the oak flavour you are accustomed to to soon come from flavourants.

Fourrier also has a great deal to say about cork. For a Frenchman, he is unusually critical. Though he does love their place in wine tradition, their failure rate has led him to revert to the old practise of sealing all his bottles with wax. 50,000 bottles are all hand sealed. Wax is the perfect substance to prevent the exchange of gas, and the subsequent oxidation of the wine, that a poor cork allows. Cork, too, is a natural product under threat from commercial expansion. Did you know that men with guns patrol prime forests to prevent theft of bark?