September 2002 Buying Guide: Bordeaux-style Red Blends
On the evidence of the most recent tasting of Bordeaux-style reds, it appears that South Africa's winemakers are becoming increasingly adept at weaving various components into a harmonious whole. Tasting panel chairman and Cape Wine Master Tony Mossop reports.
Our Bordeaux-style red blends have come of age at least that's how it looked to our sharp-palated panel. A total of 104 red wines were thoroughly evaluated over two sessions with, in fact, only 87 actually being scored as the canny WINE team slipped in no less than 17 duplicates, including most of the top seeds, just to keep us honest (all blind, of course).
Most pairs were either rated the same or, in a few cases, just a half-star apart - when the higher of the two ratings was awarded. So any surprises among your favourite big names which seem to have slipped a bit were probably given a second chance to make sure the tasters weren't missing something great. (This is a good test for the judges, who have to concentrate like hell to ensure consistency over several hours of sniffing and slurping.)
So we were delighted with the number of fine wines that emerged with handsome scores from this line-up. The four 41/2 Star winners are all from cellars which have scored big-time recently in local and international tastings: Kanu Keystone, Jordan Cobblers Hill, Veenwouden Classic and the Cordoba Crescendo all use very different recipes to attain their excellence. For example, Teddy Hall's mix is classic left bank stuff: the Keystone comprises 85% Cabernet Sauvignon, topped up with Merlot, while Chris Keet's cult Crescendo has a right bank profile of perfumed Cabernet Franc and Merlot - not a drop of Sauvignon in the bottle. Then there's the healthy crop of five 4 Stars - 'excellent, wines of distinction' according to our hedonistic scale. Again, not too many surprises here: aristocratic names such as Vergelegen, Glen Carlou and Beyerskloof stood out, with relative newcomers like Nitida's lovely Calligraphy blend and the wild card, La Couronne's Ménage à Trois, hitting fours. In fact, nine of the total squad on the table showed real class, followed by a whole platoon of 15 31/2 Star beauties.
These top wines spanned the winelands from Paarl to Durbanville, Franschhoek and Constantia - but the Stellenbosch district, with its preponderance of magnificent fruit, accounted for 70% of the crop. No wonder the 'S' brand is so strong internationally - and probably the only widely recognised Cape appellation on export labels.
"The most sought-after South African wine overseas is undoubtedly Rubicon," noted much-travelled Dave Hughes. Not always at the top of local tastings, the Meerlust flagship nevertheless epitomises for many discerning international palates all that is fine about Cape wine. De Toren's Fusion V, a blend of all five varieties, seems to be attracting the same sort of attention abroad.
This is all good news for the Bordeaux brigade in this country, with many of these top wines offering Old World elegance coupled with New World fruit flavours in a combination which simply must mean increased orders in the future.
Hughes again: "We couldn't have done a tasting like this 10 years ago and walked away as happy as we can be today. Look at those colours, for a start - healthy, plum-red, with very little browning like you used to find in the older wines made from inferior clonal material."
Admittedly, most of the wines were younger than four years old, but the '99s in particular showed great structure and balance, with promise of longevity - not an attribute of our reds of yore.
Of course the 2001s on offer were generally from the not-so-serious players, being early releases for cash flow or quality reasons. Most of the 'big names' age wines like this for at least a year in small French oak, and another good few months in bottle before release. So the 2000s tended to show much better quality, though some were still closed up.
"The wines which performed all offered ripe black fruit characters, complex aromatics from good wood and concentrated, supple tannins," felt Rustenberg's Adi Badenhorst. "The not-so-goods often had the oak aromas but were over-extracted and out of balance. Extraction is a tightrope - leave the wine on the skins too long and you overshoot and lose colour. It's so difficult to judge in the cellar at this stage, before malolactic fermentation has even started."
And do winemakers save their best wines for their blends?
"Most blends of Bordeaux grapes must be better and more complex than the single varieties," maintains Badenhorst. "You have so much more of a chance to create a balanced wine than if you are restricted to say just Cabernet which may have limitations in some vineyard blocks on the farm."
On the evidence of the most recent tasting of Bordeaux-style reds, it appears that South Africa's winemakers are becoming increasingly adept at weaving various components into a harmonious whole. Tasting panel chairman and Cape Wine Master Tony Mossop reports.
Our Bordeaux-style red blends have come of age at least that's how it looked to our sharp-palated panel. A total of 104 red wines were thoroughly evaluated over two sessions with, in fact, only 87 actually being scored as the canny WINE team slipped in no less than 17 duplicates, including most of the top seeds, just to keep us honest (all blind, of course).
Most pairs were either rated the same or, in a few cases, just a half-star apart - when the higher of the two ratings was awarded. So any surprises among your favourite big names which seem to have slipped a bit were probably given a second chance to make sure the tasters weren't missing something great. (This is a good test for the judges, who have to concentrate like hell to ensure consistency over several hours of sniffing and slurping.)
So we were delighted with the number of fine wines that emerged with handsome scores from this line-up. The four 41/2 Star winners are all from cellars which have scored big-time recently in local and international tastings: Kanu Keystone, Jordan Cobblers Hill, Veenwouden Classic and the Cordoba Crescendo all use very different recipes to attain their excellence. For example, Teddy Hall's mix is classic left bank stuff: the Keystone comprises 85% Cabernet Sauvignon, topped up with Merlot, while Chris Keet's cult Crescendo has a right bank profile of perfumed Cabernet Franc and Merlot - not a drop of Sauvignon in the bottle. Then there's the healthy crop of five 4 Stars - 'excellent, wines of distinction' according to our hedonistic scale. Again, not too many surprises here: aristocratic names such as Vergelegen, Glen Carlou and Beyerskloof stood out, with relative newcomers like Nitida's lovely Calligraphy blend and the wild card, La Couronne's Ménage à Trois, hitting fours. In fact, nine of the total squad on the table showed real class, followed by a whole platoon of 15 31/2 Star beauties.
These top wines spanned the winelands from Paarl to Durbanville, Franschhoek and Constantia - but the Stellenbosch district, with its preponderance of magnificent fruit, accounted for 70% of the crop. No wonder the 'S' brand is so strong internationally - and probably the only widely recognised Cape appellation on export labels.
"The most sought-after South African wine overseas is undoubtedly Rubicon," noted much-travelled Dave Hughes. Not always at the top of local tastings, the Meerlust flagship nevertheless epitomises for many discerning international palates all that is fine about Cape wine. De Toren's Fusion V, a blend of all five varieties, seems to be attracting the same sort of attention abroad.
This is all good news for the Bordeaux brigade in this country, with many of these top wines offering Old World elegance coupled with New World fruit flavours in a combination which simply must mean increased orders in the future.
Hughes again: "We couldn't have done a tasting like this 10 years ago and walked away as happy as we can be today. Look at those colours, for a start - healthy, plum-red, with very little browning like you used to find in the older wines made from inferior clonal material."
Admittedly, most of the wines were younger than four years old, but the '99s in particular showed great structure and balance, with promise of longevity - not an attribute of our reds of yore.
Of course the 2001s on offer were generally from the not-so-serious players, being early releases for cash flow or quality reasons. Most of the 'big names' age wines like this for at least a year in small French oak, and another good few months in bottle before release. So the 2000s tended to show much better quality, though some were still closed up.
"The wines which performed all offered ripe black fruit characters, complex aromatics from good wood and concentrated, supple tannins," felt Rustenberg's Adi Badenhorst. "The not-so-goods often had the oak aromas but were over-extracted and out of balance. Extraction is a tightrope - leave the wine on the skins too long and you overshoot and lose colour. It's so difficult to judge in the cellar at this stage, before malolactic fermentation has even started."
And do winemakers save their best wines for their blends?
"Most blends of Bordeaux grapes must be better and more complex than the single varieties," maintains Badenhorst. "You have so much more of a chance to create a balanced wine than if you are restricted to say just Cabernet which may have limitations in some vineyard blocks on the farm."
"Lots of so-called 'straight' Cabs and Merlots are blends anyway, with maybe 10% of another variety in the make-up but not mentioned on the label," pointed out Hughes. Legal, if you keep it low, and often an improvement too.
So plenty of great wine in the pipeline - except you'd better be quick, as well as having a padded wallet for the top names. Most of these are now firmly in the three-figure price bracket - but compared to even a medium-reputation Bordeaux, less than a third of the price.
That's the cost of excellence: a new French oak barrel, holding just 25 cases of wine, and usable possibly three times, will set a cellar back R7 000 these days. That's around R10 a bottle just for the oak in the wine. And all you've got left after a few years is a fancy hydrangea container - or rather, two of them!
WHAT IS A 'BORDEAUX BLEND'?
The Bordeaux region of southwest France is, quite simply, the finest red wine vineyard in the world. More wine is made there than in the entire country and it has a history of winemaking going back to Roman times. From the 12th century onwards it has had few peers as a producer of fine wines, particularly reds, and the English term 'Claret' affectionately covered all the wines imported from the ports around Bordeaux, coming to signify elegant, dry red wines sold on the British market.
Several grape varieties have thrived in the gently undulating coastal terrain of the region: at one time, Cabernet Sauvignon was a secondary grape, with Malbec and Merlot more prolific. In fact, the latter is still grown the most extensively of the five recognised varieties planted in the region, while Malbec has all but disappeared, to be found more frequently closer to the Pyrenees in the wines of Cahors.
This leaves us with the two Caber-nets, Sauvignon and Franc (also grown further North in the Loire valley), the ubiquitous Merlot, and the little used but characterful Petit Verdot.
So a classic 'Bordeaux blend' in a French context will comprise at least two of these grapes, with a very few, such as the wine of Chateau Margaux, containing all four.
Why this patchwork approach to winemaking?
Well, farmers the world over are a cautious lot. Particularly in a mono-cultural area like the vineyards around Bordeaux, it pays to have insurance - and not just of a financial nature. Grape varieties ripen at different rates and times of the year, with Cabernet Sauvignon usually the last to be picked - often at a time when frost or rain are quite likely. Hail is a spring and summer problem - whole vineyards can be wiped out just as they are flowering. So having a patchwork quilt makes for good 'insurance' cover - you often hear of a particular vintage being a good Merlot year, for example. In 1984, the earlier-ripening Merlot all but failed in the Médoc, the home of the Grand Cru chateaux. So Cab had to carry the can on this, the left bank of the Gironde estuary, while the good vignerons at the right bank vineyards of Pomerol and St Emilion were much happier - their main crop is Merlot, and it did just fine, thank you.
This tasting comprised blended reds made from two or more of the five Bordeaux red grapes.
Our clima-tic vicissitudes are not so dramatic - our winemakers blend more as artists than out of necessity. As in the homeland, ratios and recipes differ widely. That's the fascination of this style of wine.
Bordeaux Blends
4½ Stars
KANU KEYSTONE 1999
CELLAR PRICE: R65.00
Blackish plum. Smoky, lead pencil nose. Sweet-fruited mouth - blackberries, vanilla cream, coffee and chocolate. Oak restrained. Good tannin structure. Give it at least 3 to 6 years in bottle.
JORDAN COBBLERS HILL RESERVE 1999
SOLD OUT EX-CELLAR: R95.00
Blackish plum, garnet edge. Redolent of sweet fruitcake. Ripe and supple mouthful. Rich black cherries, violets and chocolate. Good structure. Nice oak on a juicy finish. A good 2 to 7 years.
CORDOBA CRESCENDO 1999
CELLAR PRICE: R100.00
Blackish plum. Complex cassis, mocha toast nose. Dense sweet earthy flavours. Smoky oak and ripe berries on the palate. Beautiful balance of oak and fruit. Pull the cork now or anytime in the next 4 years.
VEENWOUDEN CLASSIC 1999
SOLD OUT EX-CELLAR: R125.00
Ruby black with purple hues. Aromas of spice and black fruit. A rich, big-textured, intense wine. Palate boasts ripe plums, dark chocolate, fennel and coffee - but on a platform of soft tannin. This one needs time. Will develop over 2 to 8 years
4 Star
NITIDA CALLIGRAPHY 2000
SOLD OUT EX-CELLAR: R48.00
Plum, brick red rim. Pepper and cloves over plummy fruit on the nose. Tasty red fruit on the palate - plums, cherries, some vanilla and even a touch of cherry cola and marzipan. Layers of developing flavour. Good balance of soft tannin and fruit. Uncork in 2 to 4 years.
LA COURONNE MÉNAGE À TROIS 2000
CELLAR PRICE: R60.00
Black with red brick rim. Seductive nose of intense black cherry fruit and spice - nutmeg and cloves. Creamy palate backed by lots of black fruit and a hint of mint. Toasty oak on finish. A good 1 to 5 years in bottle.
BEYERSKLOOF 1999
CELLAR PRICE: R85.00
Blackish plum, cerise edge. Big cassis/mul-berry nose. Palate is zesty with licorice and dark fruit with some vanilla and chocolate. Dense chewy wine. Long balanced finish. Drink now or in the next 3 years.
GLEN CARLOU GRAND CLASSIQUE 2000
CELLAR PRICE: R100.00
Blackish plum. Complex lead pencil nose. Cassis/toast aromas with some Bovril. Palate is supple with spice, mulberries, chocolate, fennel, and licorice. Ripe tannins, well integrated. Needs time. 2 to 5 years is recommended.
VERGELEGEN 1999
SOLD OUT EX-CELLAR: R141.00
Mahogany plum. Whiffs of coffee, cassis, spice and some smoked meat. Vibrant mouth packed with chocolate and dark plum flavours. Hint of herbiness. Tannins well integrated and supple. 2 to 5 years should see this at its peak.
3½ Stars
Goede Hoop Vintage Rouge 1999 R33.25
Bertrams Robert Fuller Reserve 2001 ARP R34.77
Rhebokskloof Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 R35.00
Jordan Chameleon Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 SO R43.00
Clos Malverne Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2001 R44.50
Eikendal Classique 1999 R52.50
Klein Constantia Marlbrook 1998 R65.00
Stellenzicht Stellenzicht 1998 R69.00
Yonder Hill Inanda 2000 R75.00
Vergenoegd Reserve 1999 R90.00
Asara Bell Tower Collection 1998 R100.00
Lanzerac Classic 2000 ARP R100.00
Morgenhof Première Sélection 1998 R100.00
De Toren Fusion V 2000 SO R115.00
Rupert & Rothschild Baron Edmund 1999 R136.67
3 Stars
Kaapzicht Bin 3 Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 R38.00
Ruitersvlei Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2001 R40.00
Kumkani 2000 R43.00
Bellevue Tumara 2000 R47.00
Stony Brook Reserve 2000 SO R48.00
Laibach Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 R49.00
Muratie Ansela 1998 R58.00
Lievland DVB 1999 R60.00
Neil Ellis Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 ARP R61.00
Beaumont Ariane 2001 R68.00
Spice Route Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 R70.00
Boschendal Grand Reserve 1998 SO R70.61
Simonsig Tiara 1999 R72.00
Delaire Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1999 R75.00
Coleraine Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1999 R76.98
Môreson Magia 1999 R89.00
Rustenberg John X Merriman 1999 R90.00
Havana Hills Du Plessis Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 ARP R97.00
Buitenverwachting Christine 1999 R110.00
Kanonkop Paul Sauer 1999 R130.00
Meerlust Rubicon 1998 (only sold in 12-bottle cases) R1680.00
2½ Stars
Woolworths Grand Rouge Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 (La Motte) ARP R29.99
L'Avenir L'Ami Simon 1999 R30.00
Backsberg Klein Babylonstoren 2001 R40.00
Indalo Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 (Swartland) R40.00
Cowlin Noble Hill 1999 ARP R50.00
Lievland DVB 1997 R50.00
Rupert & Rothschild Classique 1999 R59.77
Camberley Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 R60.00
Asara Carillon Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon 1998 R70.00
Groot Constantia Gouverneur's Reserve 2000 SO R72.00
Grangehurst Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1998 R74.00
Steenberg Catharina 1999 R75.00
Delaire Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 R80.00
Slaley Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 R80.00
2 Stars
Adelberg 2001 (Simonsig) R26.00
Meerendal Cabochon 2000 R28.00
La Bri Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot Reserve 1999 R33.75
Diemersdal Private Collection 2000 R38.00
Villiera Cru Monro Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1999 R41.55
Ken Forrester Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon 1999 ARP R49.00
L'Ormarins Optima 1998 R54.32
Klein Gustrouw Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1999 R65.00
Blaauwklippen Cabriolet 2000 R68.40
Dieu Donné Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1998 R70.00
Mulderbosch Faithful Hound 2000 R70.00
Vriesenhof Kallista 1999 SO R70.00
Simonsig Tiara 1998 R72.00
Wildekrans Warrant 2001 R85.00
Warwick Trilogy 1999 R100.00
1 Star
Lammershoek Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot Reserve 2000 R27.20
Bouwland Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 R28.00
Camberley Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1998 (500ml) SO R32.00
Slanghoek Camerca 1999 R32.00
Nederburg Edelrood 2000 ARP R35.00
Buitenverwachting Meifort R39.00
Villiera Cru Monro Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2000 R41.55
Welgemeend Estate Reserve 1998 ARP R58.50
Louisvale Dominique Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1999 R60.00
Beaumont Ariane 2000 R68.00
Oude Weltevreden Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon 1999 (Weltevrede) R68.35
Also tasted
Stellendrif Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 ARP R24.00
Le Bonheur Prima 1998 R53.00
PRICES: All ex-cellar unless otherwise stipulated.
ARP: Approximate retail price
SO: Sold out ex-cellar
WINE TASTERS: Panel chairman and Cape Wine Master Tony Mossop; Cape Wine Masters Allan Mullins and Christine Rudman, honorary member of the Institute of Cape Wine Masters Dave Hughes; and Rustenberg winemaker Adi Badenhorst.
PROCEDURES: Tasting done "blind". Wines poured at 18°C. The 20-point scoring system was used: 5 Star = 18 or more out of 20; 4 Star = 16 or 17; 3 Star = 15; 2 Star = 14; 1 Star = 13; No Star = less than 13. Star ratings awarded on the basis of discussion and consensus.
RATINGS:
Superlative wine, a masterpiece. World-class.
Excellent, wine of distinction. Recommended for special occasions
and cellaring.
Good to very good. Fine character and style. Suitable for cellaring.
Above average. Appealing.
Average. Acceptable.
Ratings determined after deliberation by the panel, rather than simply calculating the average scores. Chartered AccountantsDeloitte & Touche audited the procedures to ensure fairness and accuracy.
