Neil Pendock: June 2008

Dirk van der Niepoort is a maverick winemaker operating out of the Douro valley in Portugal. He shared some thoughts over dinner recently. You speak to me, In sign language, As I’m eating a sandwich, In a small café, At a quarter to three,” wrote Bob Dylan in the song “Sign Language” that appeared on Eric Clapton’s 1976 album No Reason to Cry.

OK, so the particular sandwich I was eating happened to be foie gras on Melba toast, and the small café was Harald Bresselschmidt’s award-winning Aubergine restaurant in Gardens, Cape Town, and we were out by one (am) but Dirk van der Niepoort’s response to what his family thought of his first dry red table wines was a sign language classic – a corkscrew motion of his index finger against his temple (translation “crazy”.)

For the fifth generation of a Port producing family to throw away the aguardente and make an unfortified table wine is a bit like Ronald McDonald’s son announcing he’s become vegetarian. But that’s exactly what Niepoort did back in 1990. With the business now evenly split between fortified Ports and table wine, he does have the grace to admit the 2005 Niepoort vintage Port is the best wine he has ever made. “Serious shit”, as he put it.

“It’s unbalanced vineyards that make a truly great Port,” he continued “but you need balanced vineyards to make great wine.” Niepoort speaks with the self-confidence of the self-taught. Having studied economics in Switzerland, he’s happy he didn’t study winemaking at a university: “I haven’t been castrated. I went on a course at [University of California at] Davis once. It was on filtration and was sponsored by the filtering companies. After hearing them tell it, I was imagining giant monsters in my wine if I didn’t filter.” Then out with the index finger and that corkscrew motion again.

Niepoort is refreshingly iconoclastic: national grape Touriga Naçional “is a disaster for Portugal – everyone is planting it and soon all our wines will taste the same”. His first trip to SA was last year when he hired a camper van and toured the Western Cape with his family. “I fell in love with SA,” he admits, but has some surprising observations.

“Calitzdorp [the Port capital of SA] was a big disappointment. Just because it’s hot, doesn’t mean it’s automatically suitable for Port. Everything was wrong. We drove through much better terroir on the way there.” Putting his money where his mouth is, Niepoort is now making a Port-style wine with local winemaking phenomenon Eben Sadie. A blend of Syrah, Pinotage and Tinta Barocca, it will obviously not be a traditional Port.
Of Sadie’s own wines, Niepoort likes them very much but thinks he harvests “a little bit too late – but then I don’t like overripe grapes”, something which is clear from his quartet of fresh reds with high acids. The twin peaks are called Charme – “heaven for Burgundy lovers” – and Batuta, made in a more extractive style.

Redoma was the name chosen for his first dry red and it remains his attempt at bottling the hard, mineral character of the Douro, an area so extreme he refuses to illustrate his many talks at wine dinners and anorak jamborees with a Powerpoint slide show. “Photographs cannot capture the nature of the landscape,” he says. Much better to let your tastebuds do the tourism – oral sign language, if you like.

Neil Pendock is wine writer for the Sunday Times and Financial Mail. He judged at prominent international wine competition Concours Mondial earlier this year.