MICHAEL FRIDJHON: A fabulous tasting line-up reveals some absolute corkers

An article on Jancis Robinson’s website (jancisrobinson.com) by Tamlyn Currin stripped away much of the glamour associated with a punishing tasting schedule.

“You could say that wine writers have the golden ticket... But anyone who has tasted close to 100 wines in a day ... will disabuse you of this illusion. The focus required to keep tasting wine after wine after wine ... to then score them; to remain ‘objective’ and try to remember all the hundreds of wines that you have tasted before this one so that your score and tasting note make sense within the continuum of the vintage, is a Herculean task. I, for one, felt like my brain was bleeding by the end of it.”

The big tastings are always tough, and the ones with very good wines are often much harder. Real consistency across a large class means that every wine must be closely scrutinised. The charm of patchy is that you can get the obvious junk out of the way quickly and relatively painlessly. 

I have judged competitions (mostly in Australia and now happily mainly in the past) where the day’s work is a tasting bench groaning under 250 very young reds. Over and above the hammering your palate undergoes (and the arduous business of keeping it fit, fresh and not overwhelmed by tannin) there’s the mental exhaustion. Wine judging comes with a duty to calibrate all the time — so you taste many of the wines two or even three times. You can’t afford to lose focus on the criteria that you think best express the stylistics you wish to reward.

A few weeks back I had a fabulous tasting line-up: about 20 wines (so not even a morning’s work), several different categories (so no risk of palate fatigue), no really bad wines, very few ordinary ones, and several that clearly deserved thoughtful attention. Only four wines scored under 90 — the rest were either silver or gold medal quality. When the wines were revealed I discovered that most of the scores aligned to the wine prices. This is more unusual than you might think: fashion brands use price as a proxy for quality.

The top-scoring wines included a Plaisir Grand Plaisir white — a 2023 chardonnay that had sufficient nuance and freshness to survive the showiness of its youth. The Essa Seaside Riesling also garnered a 95-point gold, and sells for an almost identical amount (around R500).

Among the other impressive whites was a wine called Celestina and unknown to me until a few weeks ago. It’s a classic white Bordeaux blend from Agulhas — 50% sauvignon blanc, 50% semillon — expressive yet unshowy, with finely managed and quite delicate notes of mown hay, fern leaf and lime blossom. Produced from a 1.86ha vineyard in Baardskeerdersbos, it’s a stunning maiden winemaking attempt by Cape Town retailer Caroline Rillema (of Caroline’s Fine Wines).

There was a surprisingly delicious 2022 pinot noir from Groote Post: surprising because I’m not often impressed with the Cape’s renditions of the so-called “heartbreak grape” and also because it’s from Darling rather than Elgin or Hemel-en-Aarde. The Inheritance pinot noir sells for about R450 and walks the tightrope between succulence and food friendly textures with aplomb.

Other reds that caught my attention were the Klein Amoskuil Bok Amok organic bush-vine grenache — great fruit intensity without any attempt to build fake weightiness onto the palate. From the same cellar there was also an excellent 2022 mourvedre. Both scored 93 points and both cost R225.

Finally — and a real treat at the end of the tasting — the 2021 Klein Constantia Vin de Constance powered through with a score of 97. In the past decade I don’t think I’ve rated more than a dozen wines 97 or more in a blind tasting. It delivers a splendid fruit salad of mandarin, honey, melon and mango. Creamy yet fresh, it’s one of very few wines selling for more than R1,000 that trades at a discount to its vinous value.

This column was originally published in Business Day.