A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [22]
The best way to see if you’re fond of Pinotage is to look for a bottle from Kanonkop, a winery located in Stellenbosch. (I assume the name has something to do with the seventeenth-century cannon that greets you at the end of the driveway of this beautiful estate.) Kanonkop is to Pinotage what Petrarch is to the sonnet, although the winery also makes a very good Bordeaux-style blend, which has twice won France’s Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande trophy. These victories suggest that South African reds have arrived on the international scene, but the news has been slow to reach these shores.
For several years now my favorite South African red has been the Pinot Noir from Hamilton Russell Vineyards, a hill-side estate in the Walker Bay region, less than two miles from the Indian Ocean. A relative newcomer in a country whose wine history spans almost four hundred years, the property was established in 1976 by Tim Hamilton Russell, who struggled tirelessly against restrictive and irrational regulations; it’s now run by his son Anthony, an Oxford-educated whirling dervish who likes to say he’s just a farmer, although I’ve observed firsthand that he cuts a very stylish figure on dance floors from Cape Town to Manhattan.
The cool microclimate of this area, with its marauding baboons and its clay soil studded with prehistoric hand axes, produces the most Burgundian New World Pinot I’ve ever tasted, with the kind of earthiness, complexity, and age-worthiness rarely found outside Burgundy. The neighboring estate of Bouchard Finlayson, started by Hamilton Russell’s former winemaker, is also producing fine Pinot, as is newcomer Flagstone, a winery to watch for its Pinotage and blends as well.
Cabernet and Bordeaux blends are currently attracting the lion’s share of capital and energy, and the warmer region of Stellenbosch is probably the top appellation for these wines. It’s also among the most dramatic landscapes I’ve ever seen, where green valleys with white stucco Cape Dutch farmhouses could almost pass for Flemish landscapes, except that they are framed by jagged, vertiginous gray mountain ridges. The pioneer of Bordeaux-style wines in the Cape is Meerlust, an estate more than three hundred years old that makes earthy, slow-maturing reds, including a Merlot, and its standard-bearer, Rubicon (not to be confused with Francis Coppola’s wine of the same name). Another historic Stellenbosch estate, a few kilometers up the road, Rustenburg is producing serious, curranty Cabernet blends that are drawing international interest. Nearby, Rust en Vrede makes rich, powerful Cabernet, Shiraz, and Merlot, and, finally, an estate wine that is a blend of all three—which seems to be the new Cape trend. None of these wines will cost as much as a good cru bourgeois Bordeaux from the 2003 vintage.
Rupert & Rothschild, in the adjacent Paarl appellation, is a joint venture between one of South Africa’s wealthiest families and the Baron Edmond branch of the Rothschilds from France. Until his death in a car accident, it was run by Anthonij Rupert, the gruff, Charles Barkley–sized black sheep of the family. This historic estate is producing very good Cab blends, with the help of Pomerol’s ubiquitous Michel Rolland. Rupert sometimes took longer than his wines to show his charming side, but I spent a hugely entertaining day with him, talking about wine, Italian tailoring, and African wildlife after turning into his driveway unannounced, and I was saddened to hear of his death. The winemaking continues to be in the capable hands of Schalk-Willem Joubert and Rolland. Another deep-pocketed venture producing Bordeaux-style blends is Vergelegen, owned by hydra-headed Anglo-American Industries. Winemaker André van Rensburg, hired a few years back, comes with a reputation as a serious Shiraz specialist, and is planting plenty of this varietal, which is gaining ground in South Africa, as everywhere else. In fact, I suspect that Cabernet-Shiraz blends may have a big