Cabernet Sauvignon: the unfashionable king

A bottle of Boekenhoutskloof Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 with Sunday lunch proved very smart indeed. Winemaker Marc Kent has sourced fruit for this wine from the same hillside vineyard in Franschhoek ever since the maiden 1996 vintage but the 2005 also contains a small portion of Cabernet Franc from Boekenhoutskloof itself. The wine spent 27 months in French oak, 100% new and was neither filtered nor cold stabilised prior to bottling.

What was particularly charming about this wine was its fruit purity and freshness, and though made in a serious style in the sense that the overall impression was of a wine possessing intricacy and presenting as more savoury than sweet, it was nevertheless effortless to drink.

It caused me to reflect that Cabernet Sauvignon is one of the country’s strongest wine categories and yet is rather unfashionable at the moment relative to Shiraz and especially Pinot Noir.

Why should this be so? Part of the problem is that in age of instant gratification, Cabernet Sauvignon has a reputation for being firm and hard and taking years to come around, but as my experience with the Boekenhoutskloof indicates, this is at least partially erroneous. While this wine is hardly at its peak, it nevertheless has shed the gawkiness of extreme youth and already has a particular delciousness about it.
Cabernet Sauvignon also suffers from being old-school, a conservative option, terminally un-cool. The centre of quality production is establishment Stellenbosch whereas Shiraz is associated with the hipsters of the Swartland and Pinot Noir with relatively new-wave Elgin and Walker Bay.

Practitioners of South Africa’s top Cabernet are very often mild-mannered and media-shy (Neil Ellis, Etienne le Riche, Rudi Schultz and Gyles Webb of Thelema as well as Jeremey Walker of Grangehurst all just get on and do their thing) while Shiraz and Pinot Noir seem to have no shortage of charismatic campaigners (think Eben Sadie, Adi Badenhorst and co. in the case of the former and Paul Cluver, Peter-Allan Finlayson of Crystallum and Anthony Hamilton Russell in the case of the latter).

 

What applies locally also applies globally. If France is the country that lies at the heart of fine wine, then Cabernet-strong Bordeaux is perceived as aloof and elitist, producing wines only Asian billionaires can afford to drink while Pinot-oriented Burgundy is celebrated as some sort of bucolic paradise, kind and gentle farmers tilling the soil making small batches of ethereal elixir.

I return, however, to my wonderful bottle of Boekenhoutskloof recently and while I don’t want to detract from the quality advances made recently with regards either Shiraz or Pinot Noir, I do think that to overlook South African Cabernet Sauvignon is to miss out on some very fine drinking. Moreover, Cabernet Sauvignon has much more of an established track record as anybody who has experienced the likes of GS 1966 or Nederburg Auction 1974 while there is a sense that local Shiraz and Pinot Noir both remain work in progress.

Some might beg to differ, but I’m one of those that believe that Cab ultimately is king.

For more by Christian Eedes, see www.whatIdranklastnight.co.za.