I’m sitting in Hermanus on the last day of a 2 week swing through South Africa. The general theme of this trip, to loosely paraphrase Woody Allen: the food and wine is dirt cheap, and bad value too. Despite eating and drinking at most of the big names in the country, I’ve never had so much bad, overwrought food and wine in a single trip. It all looks and sounds like good stuff, until you put it in your mouth. Produce is uniformly of terrible quality (despite it being late summer here!), food is heavy, often fried, slathered with primitive, thick and often sweet sauces, and shows no regard to what’s in season. The wines are purple, sweet, uncontrollably oaky (often with poorly thought use of raw American oak); we saw row upon rows of diseased vines, vineyards on valley floor alluvium while prime hillside exposure lay bare; vines so laden with fruit they looked like they would collapse. There is a long way to go here.
But rather than dwell on the bad, I thought it would be nice to focus on what’s good (though I can’t help but urge any future visitors to avoid La Colombe). Focusing on the good also makes for a much shorter post.
The general rule is that any big name or “older” prestige vineyard is currently making swill. We didn’t have a chance to go to the Swartland, but we did sample several Sadie Family and Mullineaux bottles, all of which were quite good, albeit, in the case of Sadie Family, a bit pricey for what you get.
In Stellenbosch, the wines are generally awful. Bright spots are found at higher elevations. Perhaps the biggest surprise of our trip - and our favorite winery overall - was Stark-Conde. They are making a dynamite range of unspoofed wine, ranging from interesting, red fruited pinots from Elgin fruit, to terrific, ripe-but-balanced cabs from some of the highest Stellenbosch vineyards. Sadly, their flagship vineyard was destroyed in a fire a few years ago and has recently been replanted. Nice place to get lunch, too - simple but delicious food, a relief!
Another good stop was Thelema. Their “The Mint” cab, from a vineyard adjacent to a eucalyptus grove, is a baby Martha’s. They also make a splendid muscat dessert wine - the Constance-style Muscats tend to be one of the bright spots in SA.
In Franschhoek, times is tough. Perhaps the only acceptable visit was to Chamonix - a very nice, if masculine and whole-clustery, pinot, and an otherwise solid set of wines. Again, these guys are at elevation.
Much to our surprise, we very much enjoyed two stops at Bot River. The reds at Beaumont were OK - the standout was an elegant pinotage, one if the first I’ve tasted that I enjoyed - but the Chenins were delicious. I thought I sensed a touch of botrytis (Bot River is about 5 miles from the coast) and was delighted to discover they make a terrific botrytal dessert Chenin, which was by far my favorite dessert wine of the trip.
However, Beaumont wasn’t even the best visit in Bot River. That would be Luddite. These wines were VERY exciting. There are three wines here - a riper wine with more new oak, which we were told is the best seller internationally, and then the good stuff - a fabulous Shiraz, ripe but made without any tricks, a pure and delicious wine, and a slightly oxidative Chenin that blew my socks off, with terrific acid, a marzipan note and tons of lemony energy. The Chenin was probably my wine of the trip, and if anyone ever imports it it the states, every Jura-hound should give it a whirl. Luddite has amazing vineyards - southeast exposures with a sea breeze on the hottest days, no signs of disease - and it’s amusing to look around at the empty farmland surrounding their property when there is so much crap land planted elsewhere in the Cape.
There’s some interesting cool climate stuff going, too. The prestige pinot producers, such as they are, cluster up-valley from Hamilton Russell in the Hemel-en-Aarde valley. Generally, these pinots are quite ripe and dark and not that impressive, even though they are priced like the prime territory. My hunch is that the window for pinot is very narrow here - the coast is too cool for reds, 5 miles inland is Luddite and Beaumont growing Syrah at 14.5% - and Hamilton Russell has already snapped up the best spots.
More interesting are the wines from Elgin. Unoaked Elgin Sauvignon Blancs are ubiquitous in South Africa, cost $5-10, and are tasty and correct. I’m shocked these aren’t already a go-to wine in the states; even with a three-tier markup, these are about as good a value as there is in the world. The Elgin pinots get poo-pooed by everyone we spoke to in restaurants or wine stores, but I liked them - snappy, red fruited, and well-priced. Stark-Conde’s $9 regular pinot would put many a bourgogne or non-SVD pinot, even from good producers, to shame.
We also tasted a couple of interesting reds and whites from further east along Walker Bay, but not enough to draw any conclusions.
My takeaway from South Africa was that the further off the beaten track you went, the better the wines were. I found the Platter guide, FWIW, to be minimally useful because of over-inclusiveness; it generally spotted all the good wines but gave high ratings to plenty of crap as well. Tim James’s “Wines of the New South Africa” was a much more useful companion.
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nice one Bob—I do not visit here to often but pleased you are monitoring for me