“Elephantine.”
That’s the word used to describe the memory of wine industry professionals around the subject of pinotage, the uniquely South African grape variety that’s a cross between pinot noir and cinsault. I love the use of that word — I heard it recently during an online tasting of a selection of pinotages from South Africa — because it so accurately and distinctly captures the old-fogey nature of some industry people when it comes to that grape in particular, and the wines made from it.
Consumers, in the meantime, have moved on. Far, far on.
It’s a telling discrepancy. On one hand are the traditionalists and their elephantine memories, who cling to negative, decades-old impressions of pinotage the way former athletes cling to romantic idealizations of their long-ago glory days in sports. Interestingly, this group seems populated more by people in the trade than by casual consumers who comprise the alternate side of the discrepancy, who are more curious and interested in current iterations of today’s wines now rather than the versions of how yesterday’s wines used to be.
It’s this second group, the casual and curious consumers, who are target readers this week, as articles posted in this column “plant seeds of ideas” for new wines to try, like South African pinotage from the red wine aisle (today) and albariño from Oregon (later this week). These are wines worth tasting without the preconceptions, either positively or negatively speaking.
In that spirit, let’s start with a few notes about the context of pinotage, and descriptions of contemporary wines you’ll find in the market today.
- If you flip flop the geography of wine growing in South Africa, south to north, you’d end up in Morocco.
- COVID-induced challenges to the South African wine industry, including repeated government bans on all sales of alcohol, are both well-documented and hard to fathom. Uncorking a bottle of South African wine has begun to feel, to me, like a micro victory in itself for the growers, winemakers and businesses along the supply chain who are credited not only with creating the wine but also bringing it to consumers’ tables.
- If pinotage is new to you, and especially if you’re tasting it among friends along with a few other bottles, try sliding it into a lineup with some better-known red wines from, say, the Rhône Valley or southern France. Tasting the wines blind, side by side, presents an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast aromas and texture and overall enjoyment of the offerings in each glass.
Pinotage, the Modern Edition
“Modernized pinotage” is a compelling way to describe wines available in the market today that the old fogeys and their elephantine memories wouldn’t claim to recognize. Yet the descriptors suit modern palates at a number of touch points, including a noticeably fresher experience (especially, for me, on the nose) resulting from gentler extraction and a lighter hand inside the winery.
Tracking down wines made from “old vine” pinotage (classified as vines planted 35 years ago or longer) is worth the effort, partly for the historical context those bottles provide and partly for the conversation value of tasting through modernized examples of an “old fogey” grape. Back then, older pinotage in the vineyard would have been trellised very close to the soil whereas more contemporary vines are trellised higher up, in order to achieve more freshness in the final product.