What I Drank Last Night

How easy is it to tell the superlative from the super-quaffer? That was the theme of a social tasting last night. The line-up was tasted blind, my tasting notes and scores as follows: DeMorgenzon Reserve Chenin Blanc 2009 – Wine Spectator Top 100 Wines of 2011 Intense and complex. Peach, spice and some leesy notes. [...]

Lunch yesterday with Hennie Coetzee and Maggie Mostert of Batonage.com at Mexican restaurant El Burro in Green Point. Huge fans of the wines of Jean Daneel, they insisted I share their last bottle of Jean Daneel Signature Chenin Blanc 2003 with them after I recently wrote a favourable review of the 2006 vintage of this [...]

A debate I’ve had among my colleagues tasting for Platter’s 2012 concerns the merits of tasting by category versus those of tasting by producer. Tasting by category allows the taster to assess technical elaboration: consider half a dozen examples of Cabernet Sauvignon for instance by comparing one to the other, you’re able to discern relatively [...]

I’m not one to dismiss single-variety Sauvignon Blanc as inherently inferior à la some of our more high-profile critics and anybody making wine in the Swartland but I have to say that the Nederburg Private Bin D252 Sauvignon Blanc Semillon 2009 as the only white blend did shade just about all of the eight examples [...]

A continuous point of debate while judging the Unwooded Sauvignon Blanc Class during this year’s Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show was how much methoxypyrazine character to tolerate. In line with the general tendency prevalent locally at the moment, I was inclined to give high reward to wines showing a pronounced herbaceous character, international judge Debra [...]

Colleague Angela Lloyd wrote an article for the April issue of WineLand magazine on what makes a good wine judge. Towards this, she put a set of questions to various local and international judges. Here are my answers: 1) Why do you act as a judge? Having stumbled into wine writing, I quickly realised that [...]

If Merlot hasn’t already taken over from Pinotage as the most problematic red wine category in South Africa, then it should. Even so, there are a handful of producers that can make excellent wine from the variety, Thelema in Stellenbosch being one of them. Last night the 1994 and who would’ve thought local Merlot could [...]

The Quoin Rock cellar is located in the Simonsberg ward of Stellenbosch, but the range also includes wines made from vineyards in Cape Agulhas such as this, a partially wooded Sauvignon Blanc named after a Danish ship that sank there in 1783. The 2007 was maiden vintage and it comes highly decorated (best wooded Sauvignon [...]

A cracking wine showing a range of aromas and flavours from grassy-green through to ripe granadilla with bright but not harsh acidity. Pure fruited and not as “nervy” as I suspect it was on release. It rated 5 Stars in Platter’s 2010, where it got this rather fanciful description: “Minerality is the seam binding in [...]

Spectrum 2008 was made by Callie Louw during his brief stint at Tulbagh Mountain Vineyards and drinking it yesterday I can see why Marc Kent was so keen to poach him away to work on the Porcelain Mountain project in the Swartland. Bottled exclusively for retail chain Woolworths, this wine was rated 5 Stars in [...]