Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [91]
South Africa
A glass of Pinotage (PEE-no-tahj) with your roast warthog? Well … okay, sign me up. While working for a company called Restaurant Associates, I had the privilege of catering to the thirsts of a most distinctive and distinguished group of customers: most of Wall Street’s CEOs (we did their corporate dining), the world’s top musical talent (we fed Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center, among others), and the global diplomatic community by way of the United Nations. The U.N. occasion was a celebration of South African culture, including its food and wine. By the way, warthog and Pinotage are a great food and wine match.
South Africa’s top-quality wines are all Big Six varietals—notably Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Sauvignon, but its calling card is the red Pinotage, a cross between two French grapes: Pinot Noir and a Rhône red called Cinsaut (San-SEW). It is medium- to full-bodied, with a spicy, gamy sauvage character—definitely worth trying.
All of South Africa’s quality growing regions are clustered in what is called the Coastal Region, one of the legally approved Wine of Origin districts, which are South Africa’s appellations. The best Coastal Region subdistricts to look for are Stellenbosch, Paarl, and Constantia. The following wineries are among my favorites:
Thelema (Tuh-LEE-muh): known for Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon
Glen Carlou: outstanding Chardonnay
Mulderbosch: one of the world’s great Sauvignon Blancs
Kanonkop (Cuh-NON-cop): Pinotage
For value wines, look for Swartland and Indaba.
“WHO’S WHO” OF SOUTH AFRICAN WINE IMPORTERS Cape Classics and Cape Ventures are considered among the best importers of South African wines. They carry a lot of boutique wineries that are worth trying.
Buying Strategies for the Rest of the Old World
Although the French and Italian benchmark wines that we have explored are great, you should not limit your Old World wine buying to just these. For one, those wines are world classics, and are priced as such. Second, there is so much great wine that you would miss with this strategy, both in France and Italy, not to mention the rest of Europe, and we can’t have that.
Besides, at one time or another most of us have discovered how much fun it can be to go off the beaten path and explore what only the locals and insiders know. That is what we will do here. I will give you a summary of the not-to-be-missed wines from the rest of the Old World wine countries that I think are worthy of your attention, specifically Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Austria. I will also give you, for these countries and for Italy and France, the importer names that will make buying these wines absolutely hassle-free.
WHAT ABOUT …?
Although I have not included some European wine countries (e.g., Switzerland and Greece) in this summary, it is not because I don’t think they make worthy wines. The commercial reality is that the quantities exported to the United States are so small, they are rarely seen in the typical wine shop.
Spain
I love Spain. I have been seduced by its people and pageantry; charmed by the cheeses, suckling pig, and tripe stew (they didn’t tell me what it was before I tried it); and utterly humiliated in my flamenco attempts at Fazil’s Dance Studio at Forty-eighth Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan (though I’m not giving up yet). But the wines won me over before all that. At first I tried them because I could afford them. Although, as in every wine-growing country, there is a burgeoning trend toward boutique wines (with prices to match), Spain’s value for the money at every price point continues to impress me.
Quality is on a major roll. I first visited the Spanish wine country in 1985 for college kicks during a summer abroad. I had no sense at the time of the significance of what I saw in the wineries, but I remembered it. When I returned in 1990,