Bruce Jack

Creating a South African Style Blend, Bruce Jack

Flagstone winemaker Bruce Jack reckons blending is the coolest part of his job. Get it right, he says, and it "smells like divine intervention" and "tastes like sex appeal". But you won't find him making a Bordeaux-style red blend. "I can't see the point," he tells Joanne Simon.

 

"Non-Bordeaux" has always struck me as an unfortunate way to describe a style (or, in fact, several styles) of wine. A bit like being classified as "non-white" during the apartheid era, the implication of inferiority is there. And that's just plain wrong, at least if you ask Bruce Jack, the Flagstone winemaker who also boasts a degree in political science and studied for his Master of Letters at St Andrews University, Scotland.

"Bordeaux was just a swamp that the Brits drained," he mutters, referring to the fact that for centuries after Henry Plantagenet's marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, the English Crown controlled much of western France, including the port of Bordeaux, but not the large and commercially successful vineyards of the Haut Pays or "high country" upstream (Gaillac, Bergerac, Buzet and Cahors). "This increased English reliance on the lesser vineyards of Bordeaux and its environs, encouraging their expansion," confirms the Oxford Companion to Wine. "And then centuries of English wine writers wrote about how brilliant Bordeaux was," fumes Jack. "I think haggis from the left bank of Murrayfield would become as sought-after as Bordeaux if sufficient journalists made enough of a fuss about it!"

In any case, he warns, Bordeaux's glory days may be numbered. "Organic is going to be the new snobbism, and I don't think Bordeaux is in a very good position when it comes to the environment."

He adds: "One reason Bordeaux ages so well is that it's so full of sulphur - a third more than we're allowed to use here."

Suffice to say you won't find him painstakingly crafting a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and/or Malbec in his Somerset West cellar, a converted dynamite factory designed by renowned architect Sir Herbert Baker over a century ago. "Bowwood is a Cab-Merlot blend," he concedes, "but that's only because Bowwood, the Cabernet vineyard on the south-facing slopes of Julian and Bridget Johnsen's spectacular farm in the Perdeberg Mountains, just so happens to have some Merlot planted on it, and the grapes are farmed together."

It soon becomes clear that Jack is not a great fan of South African Merlot. "We haven't always had the right clones in this country," he explains. "Until very recently, the early 2000s, almost all of it was the Italian clone so a lot of the wine produced was horrible - not to mention that the blends might as well have been Italian rather than Bordeaux styles! Now we do have the right clones but the vines are still too young."
As far as blending Bordeaux grape varieties in the cellar goes, he says: "We don't do it because … well, it's boring. I mean, I can see how it might be fun to do - Charles Back does it as a joke [his Bored Doe blend] - but just because it works in Bordeaux is irrelevant to us. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it - some people do it very well, like De Toren. But doing non-Bordeaux blends is a bit like America not taking on cricket and inventing baseball instead. It's not that baseball is better than cricket, just that they did something different and made it their own."

It is partly for this reason that Jack was part of the group that voted for a legal requirement that Cape Blends contain at least 30% Pinotage, South Africa's home-grown crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut. "Chucking Pinotage in is a nice option because it makes it South African; it's a point of difference."

Flagstone's Dragon Tree blend combines Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinotage, Shiraz and Merlot in proportions that vary from year to year. "There is no formula - we don't really believe in formulas. What does remain the same are the main varieties we use - Pinotage and Cabernet Sauvignon. It has contained less than 30% Pinotage - the 2004 had 28% and the 2005 even less - but I still think 30% is the way to go in order for a wine to be classified as a Cape Blend."

Not that Jack believes the best South African blends will necessarily turn out to be Pinotage-based either. "The Chateau Libertas from the '60s that has aged so well was a blend of Cab, Cinsaut and Shiraz. There are so many factors to consider besides variety - the age of the vines, the soil type, the climate, the vintage, the person managing the vineyards… But if the greatness of Bordeaux is in its elegance, purity of fruit, minerality and longevity, then I believe we can achieve all of those things more easily through other blends. Or by all means use Bordeaux varieties, but throw in a wild card as well."

Jack's Mary le Bow blend of mostly Cabernet Sauvignon (62% in 2004), Shiraz (25%) and some Merlot (13%), for example, is made in partnership with the Frater family in Ashton with the aim of "effortlessly displaying the hallmarks of the great wines (many of them European)" - even though the blend would fail to comply with any European classification criteria.
"In South Africa we've always formulated our opinions based on how grapes are planted elsewhere. I think we should plant everything everywhere and form our own opinions. After all, our climate and soils are so different."

Jack says one unexpected discovery is that the new clone of Merlot planted in recent years appears to be particularly robust in our climate. "People always think Merlot is a cool-climate grape because it's a Bordeaux grape, but the new clone actually stands up to the heat better than Shiraz!"

Shiraz, meanwhile, may thrive on the clay-rich soils of the warm Swartland but it also yields great wines from the Jack family's own southerly vineyards around Napier (near Elim). "Elim is not the coolest area but it's windy, and by that I don't mean occasional gusts but such sustained stress that the vines use 80% of their energy just standing upright! That's exactly what you want for Shiraz. It's a grape with Attention Deficit Disorder. It's wild. And one way to contain its wildness is the wind."

But Shiraz, as it happens, isn't the main focus of Jack's attention back at the family ranch. Planted most defiantly of all (in between the Mourvèdre, Barbera and a whole host of Portuguese varieties) are Malbec and Tannat because, as Jack points out, the famous "Black Wine of Cahors" in Roman times was a blend of these two grapes and, in his opinion, they represent "one of the great travesties of winemaking history" - the afore-mentioned rise of Bordeaux resulting in the far superior wine areas upstream, including Cahors, being destroyed because the Bordelais taxed their "stunning wines with amazing longevity" so heavily.

"Cahors went from 40 000ha of vineyards down to less than 4 000," comments Jack. "Today the region just limps along, and as you drive through the valley you see these broken-down chateaux that in their day were as magnificent as Haut Brion or Lafite..."

So far has the appellation fallen that there is no-one in the world making a "Cahors-style blend" today. "I think there's one guy in Argentina and another in McLaren Vale, Australia, doing a proprietary blend with Malbec, but nobody's also using Tannat. Nobody has planted their farm to those varieties specifically."

Enter Bruce Jack, who also plans to add some Shiraz to the mix ("because it does so well here") and tiny percentages of Portuguese varieties like Tinta Barroca, Tinta Amarela and Tinta Roriz (better known by its Spanish name, Tempranillo). "The Portuguese varieties are like spices - they've got such concentration and extract that you could never drink them on their own, like eating a cardamom pip or chewing on a vanilla pod, but in tiny amounts they are wonderful."

Blending, he concludes, is all about synergy, whether it's combining several grape varieties or using one grape variety sourced from several different vineyards, or adding a white wine to a red wine for colour stabilisation and enhanced mouthfeel (Viognier and Shiraz in the northern Rhône; Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in Burgundy; Chardonnay and Pinotage in the Flagstone cellar…).

"In South Africa, from a legislation perspective, we have the opportunity to blend anything we want to, so we should take advantage of that instead of fixating on Bordeaux. At Flagstone I expect we'll be experimenting with different blends for the next 20 years and then hopefully we'll have some idea about what works best in South Africa."