MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Many happy returns to pinotage

SA wine drinkers should brace themselves for a year of festivities as pinotage turns 100. While this might not be a cause for universal celebration, it also need not necessarily provoke the kind of cringe fashionable back in the 1980s.

Pinotage was created by Professor Perold — at the time the Cape’s pre-eminent viticulturist — in 1925 by crossing pinot noir (renowned for the delicacy of its flavours) with cinsaut (admired for its hardiness and resistance to disease).

Perold appears to have forgotten all about it when he left the University of Stellenbosch to take up an appointment at the KWV in 1928. The garden at his former home had grown wild so the university sent a team to clean up the welter of weeds, vines and plants. Charles Niehaus, a young lecturer who knew about the seedlings, was passing by at exactly the time the team arrived. Had he not intervened it’s probable none of the young vines would have survived. Instead they were taken to the Elsenburg Agricultural College and saved for posterity.

Pinotage didn’t exactly burst onto the local wine scene with the radiance of a comet. For the first 15 years of its existence nothing much happened. It was first planted commercially at Myrtle Grove near Somerset West and on Kanonkop in the 1940s. As far as I have been able to determine, fruit from these vines was blended into cheap drinking wine to add body and colour.

The oldest vineyard today (planted in 1950) is at the De Waal farm in Stellenbosch. The next oldest is on Bellevue and was the source of the grapes used to make the famous Lanzerac bottling in 1959. The third oldest vineyard, planted in 1955, is on Meerendal. At 5.8ha, it’s the largest of the heritage blocks and its existence may help to explain why the estate will host the centenary celebrations later this year (October 9-12).

It’s been many years since Meerendal’s pinotage enjoyed hero status. The recent winemaking history has been too erratic. At the same time the super-muscular style preferred by the Absa Pinotage Top Ten judges is too robust to be easily produced on the estate. You would need a long memory or a very deep cellar to be familiar with the great wines produced there by the late Kosie Starke in the 1960s and 1970s.

When Herman Coertze bought the property 20 years ago he acquired one of the region’s iconic estates, but in a badly rundown condition. It’s taken more time than he probably bargained for to tidy up his acquisition. Land has been consolidated, a boutique hotel created around the old manor house, vineyards replanted or brought back to life. Central to this has always been the 1955 pinotage vineyard: a proprietor less conscious of the burden of history might have grubbed it up.

Now the special site has its own barrel cellar, where the fruit from the old vines gets to mature in French oak before a selection is made. Some goes into the estate’s Cape blend — called The Loft — and some into the single site Heritage Pinotage. The 2023 vintage — the first made by Wade Roger-Lund who took over as cellarmaster in 2022 — is about to be released. At the not inconsiderable price of R1,250 per bottle, it’s likely to become an everyday beverage only for oligarchs. But it does send a message about the importance of pinotage at Meerendal.

The next vintage (2024 — and still in barrel) conveys this even more clearly. It also makes an even more trenchant statement about the style of pinotage to which the heritage vineyard is best suited: fine and fragrant rather than bold and blockbustery. A young winemaker working with ancient vines has created a more contemporary style of pinotage. It’s a beacon other producers ignore at their peril.

Business Day.