Medallions aside, there is some significance to pinotage’s survival. Most man-made crossings such as pinotage don’t long outlive their progenitors. However powerful the logic that led to their development (disease or weather resistance), interest in them wanes in the face of a more rigorous and Darwinian process that separates the aesthetic from the scientific.
The first and most important of these is that the grapes must produce fine wine. A great beverage beats an easy-to-farm grape by the proverbial country mile. So it’s a tribute to pinotage and the hard-headed individuals who have put their weight behind it that it is still here a century after Perold created the cultivar by the botanical equivalent of the IV method.
Alistair Wood, who this year celebrates 40 years since he acquired GlenWood in Franschhoek and 25 years since the first vintage was produced at the property, chose to make chardonnay his primary focus. It was, after all, a variety known to produce some of the world’s best wines.
He discovered that his site is ideally suited to the styles of chardonnay he likes to produce. These range from a fresh and accessible unwooded bottling, via his Vignerons’ Selection, a quite Burgundian cuvée priced at R350 a bottle, up to his Grand Duc reserve (R700) — which is splendidly and unashamedly oaked and opulent.
There are several other wines in the range, including a semillon produced in small volumes from a block of vines planted at the turn of this century and the Grand Duc Syrah — a red wine in the same mould as the property’s flagship chardonnay.
At a lunch to celebrate his four decades on the estate Wood reminisced about the Franschhoek he arrived at 40 years ago. It was a small farming town with a couple of wine estates on its outskirts but little to suggest it would become one of the industry’s showpiece destinations.
DP Burger, who joined Wood as farm manager (and in time became winemaker) is still with him 34 years later. His career in Franschhoek predates life on GlenWood: he worked as a barman for Ludwig and Lodina Maske at the old Quartier Francais. The Maskes — who now run the town’s finest wine and cheese store (La Cotte Inn) — were at the celebration with other members of the community who remember when Franschhoek was a “town too far”.
While Burger remains cellarmaster, Natasha Pretorius, who joined the team eight years ago as his assistant, has since become the winemaker. Trained as a microbiologist and wine biotechnologist she decided to exchange life in a laboratory for life in a cellar. GlenWood under Wood seems to be the kind of place where people can become their best version of themselves.
The farm is a few kilometres off the main road, away from the bustle of the mini-metropolis Franschhoek has become. The winery is small but not chaotic, functional but not Hollywood. It perfectly expresses the estate and its wines: homely, impervious to fashion, authentic — the kind of place you don’t cruise by to taste at, but instead set aside the afternoon to savour and enjoy.
Business Day
MICHAEL FRIDJHON: An authentic winery away from bustling Franschhoek
GlenWood is small, homely and impervious to fashion
Image: Supplied
This year will see several jubilee celebrations in the wine industry. Pinotage turns 100 so a special medallion is being struck for the occasion. I don’t wish to sound curmudgeonly (at least not in connection with the pinotage festivities) but there’s very little I would look forward to less than a pinotage medallion.
I recognise that this is a matter of taste — not the taste of the wine but the aesthetic that seeks to celebrate seemingly significant events by stamping a lump of metal for your heirs and legatees to dispose of guiltily and surreptitiously.
For those who are interested, the Cape Mint has collaborated with the Pinotage Association to engrave this tribute. It has been “designed with the Italian Numismatic tradition” (sic) and it seeks to capture “the essence of a grape born in 1925 by Professor AI Perold, from Pinot Noir and Cinsault (Hermitage)”.
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Medallions aside, there is some significance to pinotage’s survival. Most man-made crossings such as pinotage don’t long outlive their progenitors. However powerful the logic that led to their development (disease or weather resistance), interest in them wanes in the face of a more rigorous and Darwinian process that separates the aesthetic from the scientific.
The first and most important of these is that the grapes must produce fine wine. A great beverage beats an easy-to-farm grape by the proverbial country mile. So it’s a tribute to pinotage and the hard-headed individuals who have put their weight behind it that it is still here a century after Perold created the cultivar by the botanical equivalent of the IV method.
Alistair Wood, who this year celebrates 40 years since he acquired GlenWood in Franschhoek and 25 years since the first vintage was produced at the property, chose to make chardonnay his primary focus. It was, after all, a variety known to produce some of the world’s best wines.
He discovered that his site is ideally suited to the styles of chardonnay he likes to produce. These range from a fresh and accessible unwooded bottling, via his Vignerons’ Selection, a quite Burgundian cuvée priced at R350 a bottle, up to his Grand Duc reserve (R700) — which is splendidly and unashamedly oaked and opulent.
There are several other wines in the range, including a semillon produced in small volumes from a block of vines planted at the turn of this century and the Grand Duc Syrah — a red wine in the same mould as the property’s flagship chardonnay.
At a lunch to celebrate his four decades on the estate Wood reminisced about the Franschhoek he arrived at 40 years ago. It was a small farming town with a couple of wine estates on its outskirts but little to suggest it would become one of the industry’s showpiece destinations.
DP Burger, who joined Wood as farm manager (and in time became winemaker) is still with him 34 years later. His career in Franschhoek predates life on GlenWood: he worked as a barman for Ludwig and Lodina Maske at the old Quartier Francais. The Maskes — who now run the town’s finest wine and cheese store (La Cotte Inn) — were at the celebration with other members of the community who remember when Franschhoek was a “town too far”.
While Burger remains cellarmaster, Natasha Pretorius, who joined the team eight years ago as his assistant, has since become the winemaker. Trained as a microbiologist and wine biotechnologist she decided to exchange life in a laboratory for life in a cellar. GlenWood under Wood seems to be the kind of place where people can become their best version of themselves.
The farm is a few kilometres off the main road, away from the bustle of the mini-metropolis Franschhoek has become. The winery is small but not chaotic, functional but not Hollywood. It perfectly expresses the estate and its wines: homely, impervious to fashion, authentic — the kind of place you don’t cruise by to taste at, but instead set aside the afternoon to savour and enjoy.
Business Day
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