What I Drank Last Night

This wine was the 1998 winner in Wine magazine’s Pinotage Champion of the Year competition and also received 5 Stars in the 1999 edition of Platter’s. It was the first solo bottling  from a vineyard that was then 45 years old, and it spent 22 months in French oak, 100% new. Drinking it 15 years [...]

Results of the 16th annual Wine magazine Chenin Blanc Challenge have been announced. There were 111 entries compared to 133 in 2010. Best overall Perdeberg Rex Equus 2008 Best value: Douglas Green 2010 (4 Stars vs. R31.50/bottle) The top 12 (hypothetical mixed case): Boschendal 2009 Fort Simon 2009 Graham Beck Bowed Head 2009 Katbakkies 2008 [...]

How wine styles change. The Rudera Robusto Chenin Blanc 2002 which won the 2005 Wine magazine Chenin Blanc Challenge famously had a residual sugar of 15.7g/l. It picked up 4½ Stars then, a rating it retained  when a retrospective of previous winners was undertaken for the February 2010 issue. If Sauvignon Blanc becomes more like [...]

It is curious to me how one particular producer can be a front-runner in a particular category for a while and then seemingly get overtaken by other producers who deliver wines even more impressive and aesthetically pleasing. Stellenbosch farm Simonsig enjoyed significant success with its Merindol Syrah in the mid-2000s, the 2000 vintage winning double [...]

A remarkable wine in a number of respects. Firstly, it won the title of Wine magazine’s Pinotage Champion of the Year in 2003. This was the last time the competition was held with the Shiraz Challenge replacing it in 2004, after the decision was taken to switch editorial emphasis from the Pinotage to Shiraz on [...]

The Alvi’s Drift range of wines from the Worcester farm Alfalfa owned by the Van der Merwe family is worth keeping an eye on. There are 350ha of vineyard on this 5 000ha property and own label production dates from 2002 driven by doctor-turned-winemaker Alvi van der Merwe who recently enlisted former Distell group winemaker [...]

The problem with South African wine writing is that nobody’s prepared to make really big calls. A bunch of my colleagues went up to Upington for the Orange River Winemaker of the Year Competition recently but I’m buggered if any of them came back with recommendations about wines we should actually seek out and buy. [...]

Yesterday the Wine magazine Best Value Wine Show at the The Vineyard Hotel & Spa in Newlands, Cape Town. Fifteen wineries present, those invited to exhibit required to have had at least one wine rated 20 out of 20 according the good value system as applied in the 2011 Ultra Liquors Best Value Wine Guide [...]

In the November 2009 issue of Wine magazine, I wrote: “One issue to ponder, as wine lovers consider the future of Sauvignon Blanc in the South African context, is the role of multi-regional blends. Sauvignon is arguably one the ultimate terroir wines in the sense that there is theoretically little to obscure the impact of [...]

Both the 2009 and 2010 vintages of Graham Beck Pheasants’ Run were among the 2010 Wine magazine Sauvingon Blanc Top 10. This continues the remarkable run of success that this wine has enjoyed in this competition since it was started four years ago its record to date as follows: 2007: 2007 in the Top 10, [...]