JC le Roux Pinot Noir Rosé
Sparkling wine specialist JC le Roux is the first cellar to win the Amorim Cap Classique Challenge with a Rosé.
There’s a bit of “about time!” as well as “how’d they do that?” to JC le Roux’s victory in the 2008 Amorim Cap Classique Challenge with their Pinot Noir Rosé 2006. It’s about time inasmuch as the bubbly folks in the Devon Valley of Stellenbosch have been making good fizz according to the traditional method since the mid 1980s.
But it's intriguing because this is the first year that the annual taste-off has been won with a pink wine, because the cellar has undergone several changes in winemaker in recent years – the incumbent having only been involved in making bubbly for a year and a half – and because the 2006 vintage of the Pinot Noir Rose is a stylistic change from previous releases 1998 and 1999.
Not that JC – named after French Huguenot Jean le Roux who settled in Stellenbosch 300 years ago – hasn’t triumphed before. In 2006 it won the Challenge with the Desiderius Pongrácz 2001. But it’s been 20 years since the Distell operation first began making top-rated JC le Roux Pinot Noir and Chardonnay Cap Classiques.
And not that the winemaking at JC isn’t or hasn’t been steered by toprate winemakers of late, but... Following the departure of bubbly maestro Melanie van der Merwe (now doing her own thing with Tanzanite) and then her successor Wilhelm Pienaar (now studying for an MBA), Elunda Basson only took over as cellarmaster in 2007, having previously made red wine at Nederburg for eight years.
A very good maker of red wine Basson is, too, having had a hand in The Winemaster’s Reserve Shiraz 2006 that came out on top in the Lexus Shiraz Challenge earlier this year. However, making wine of the type that Champagne became famous for is a different ballgame altogether. And although Van der Merwe still pays the occasional visit from where she now lives in the Breede River Valley, with Pienaar currently overseas, Basson is pretty much on her own. Bennie Liebenberg heads up the viticultural side of things, but there are no other Cap Classique bubbly makers in the company to speak of. Hers can be a lonely job, and she’s still dreaming about her first visit to the Champagne region of France, possibly next year.
As a mother of two with a husband in the academic world and a house in Durbanville, Basson’s life revolves around family, wine and sport – they’re rugby mad and followed the Beijing Olympics fairly closely. She loves the idea of travelling some more, having spent time in the winelands of Italy on a study tour and at Dry Creek Vineyards in Sonoma Country, California. Right now, though, she’s revelling in what she describes as one of the greatest moments in her winemaking career, tearyeyed at the news of having won the Cap Classique Challenge at her first attempt.
Basson doesn’t come from a winemaking background although, with family farming in Namaqualand and the Klein Karoo, she’s always been interested in nature and agriculture. After completing her winemaking studies at the University of Stellenbosch and then Elsenburg in 1997 – the same class as Adi Badenhorst (ex Rustenberg) and Lukas Wentzel of Groote Post in Darling – she assisted with harvests at Rickety Bridge in Franschhoek and at Dry Creek in California before joining Nederburg in Paarl. Mentors include Charles Hopkins of De Grendel in Durbanville, Nederburg cellarmaster Razvan Macici and, more recently, her boss at Distell, Callie van Niekerk.
Scintilla, made from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, is Basson’s favourite in the JC le Roux range, so she is surprised yet delighted that the Pinot Noir Rosé came out ahead in the Cap Classique Challenge. At R94 a bottle excellar for the 2006, the Pinot Noir Rosé hasn’t been a bigvolume wine or a sales priority until now, but with both still and sparkling Rosé taking off in popularity, the win is a good platform to build from – 9 000 bottles of the 2006 were made, an amount which doubled in 2007, and it will be no surprise if the figure is tripled in 2008 or 2009.
Halfway through 2007, when Basson arrived at JC le Roux, the 2006 Pinot Noir Rosé was already in bottle. After the second fermentation, it was resting on its lees prior to disgorgement (removal of the yeast cells and addition of dosage, in this case 8 to 10ml of red wine), after which the Champagne-type corks would be inserted and wired down. Disgorgement took place from end-2007 to January 2008 after 18 months on the lees – much shorter than in previous vintages,carbonated JCs are finished and bottled after the base wine is made and blended elsewhere, mostly at The Bergkelder. For more information about the Cap Classique winemaking process, see www.winemag.co.za.
The grapes for the Pinot Noir Rosé are from Stellenbosch, albeit not from Devon Valley, and, as with still wine, the fruit selection for Cap Classique must be done with the foresight of how the wine will turn out. Deciding on the blend can be a daunting time for the winemaker – bearing in mind that picking time is usually earlier than for other wines and that the base wines for Cap Classique are very different in character relative to those for red and white table wines.
Disgorgement is also a critical time: “I didn’t sleep for a few nights before the 2006 Pinot Noir Rosé was disgorged,” says Basson, whose responsibilities included deciding on the degree of dryness, the red wine dosage, and the colour of the wine. “The JC le Roux Pinot Noir is extra brut [dry] relative to the Pinot Noir Rosé, and the colour of the latter is a light salmon pink,” she comments. “I’m not a traditionalist, and I’m getting away from onion-skin colours, which don’t quite work for South Africa. I wanted the wine to be younger, fresher and a bit funkier, with a touch of red lifting the Pinot Noir character, especially on the nose.”
Beautiful colour, a taste that wowed the judges and just 11.5% alcohol by volume make this a marvellous anytime drink that the winemaker reckons should remain in mint condition for the next three to four years.
