Sweet wines have a bad reputation in the United States as cheap, watered-down alternatives to the more refined, dry styles. Keep your sticky white zins to yourself, I thought when I began getting interested in wine. I’ll drink my zippy sauvignon blancs and tannic cabernets. Continue reading
I’d been waiting for some time for the epic dinner that took place at Stevie’s house with four of my favorite people (myself not included). While in South Africa at Glen Carlou, I’d tasted through their portfolio, including a sweet wine made from 100% Chenin Blanc. I bought a bottle with the express desire to share it with this group – and I was overjoyed when the day finally came.
This wine, combined with my lamb supply and Stevie’s desire for Kuku Kadoo, resulted in the following delicious menu:
Friday night, I was supposed to cook dinner for Stevie for her belated birthday present, but my partner-in-crime/sous chef came down with the stomach flu. Instead of canceling dinner plans altogether, we decided instead to cook together at her place. She and Josiah would provide the sustenance, I would bring dessert and birthday wine. I won’t go into detail about how deliciously perfect the steak with bone marrow butter was, since Stevie has already done so. I also won’t talk about the dessert, since I’ve already described it before. What I want to talk about instead is the wine.
For Christmas a few years ago, my mother gave me a wine club membership, where 3 unspecified bottles showed up on my hypothetical doorstep each month. Each wine came with a distinct recipe to pair with the wine, which still proves at times to be an interesting exercise in flavor combinations that had never before occurred to me. Some of these were easy drinking, less expensive wines, while others were a bit nicer and meant for laying aside.
One of the latter was a 2004 Rust en Vrede Estate Blend. I’d earmarked this wine months ago as one I wanted to try with Stevie, and her birthday/the delicious steak dinner that she had planned/the confluence of my upcoming trip seemed the perfect occasion to pop it. And boy was I right. The wine was a luxuriant, velvety, thick, balanced blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, and Merlot. It was big, bold, and fruity, with subtle tannins from the bottle age that rounded it out.
Josiah, who is a sommelier, said that it was the first South African wine he’d been truly impressed with – mostly, he thought, the wines tasted like an ash tray to him. And to be fair, there was an element of ashiness to this wine, which must be representative of the terroir, but it was so beautifully counterbalanced by the depth of the Cab, the fruit of the Merlot, and snazzy spice of the Shiraz that the wine just tasted…smooth.
Rust en Vrede is a 315 year old vineyard that was founded by in 1694 by the then Governor of the Cape, Willem Adrian van der Stel. The winery specializes exclusively in red wine production, producing full-bodied reds aged in new oak. The wines coming from this estate seem to defend the notion that Stellenbosch may be the premier region for red wine production in South Africa. The 2004 Estate Blend was pure deliciousness. Even the experts approved. Happy birthday Stevie!
I am gearing up for a trip to South Africa at the beginning of April to celebrate my birthday – I bought the ticket months ago and have slowly been setting up my itinerary. Everyone keeps asking me if I am planning to go on a safari and visit the lions. The answer is no. This is a wine trip.
Thus far, I am planning to spend a few days in Cape Town, hoping to wander the town, stumble upon good food, hike Table Mountain, and potentially drive down to the Cape of Good Hope to see penguins. Then, I am driving to Paarl to spend a few days visiting Backsberg, Glen Carlou, and a few others.
I have been brushing up on my South African history, particularly as related to the wine industry, and I thought I’d share a few interesting nugglets of information here. If you are a history buff, keep reading.
1652 – the Dutch arrive at the Cape of Good Hope and set up an outpost on the Europe-India trade route
1659 – the first grapes on record are pressed
1679 – Simon van der Stel arrives and imposes the first wine-making regulations
1685 – van der Stel acquires Constantia, South Africa’s first internationally renowned winery, producing wines that were highly favored in the courts of Europe (Vin de Costance was Napoleon’s favorite wine)
1688-90 – After fleeing Europe, 200 French Huguenots establish Franschoek (the French corner, in Dutch), another wine-growing area in the Western Cape
throughout much of the 18th and early 19th c – SA establishes itself as a leading exporter of port- and sherry-style fortified wines, especially benefitting from Napoleon’s Continental System, which blockaded the British
post-Napoleon – sale crisis due to the low quality of wine, whose high yields and overproduction could not compete with the leading wines of Europe
late 19th c – phylloxera and mildew epidemics reach SA and ravage vineyards
start of the 20th c – export trade market dries up, further decreasing production
1918 – Koöperatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging, a winemakers’ cooperative, was founded to begin establishing wine controls
1924 – KWV given legal authority to fix the price of wine used to make brandy
1925 – the Pinotage grape was created by crossing Pinot Noir and Cinsault (known as Hermitage in SA) by viticulturalist Abraham Izak Perold
1940 – SA government fully transferred the supervision of the wine sector to the KWV, allowing it to determine wine prices, permissable yields, varieties, planting rights, and production methods, as well as to control the surpluses
1948 – apartheid established in SA
1959 – first call to boycott South African goods, including wine exports, as a response to apartheid
1980s – boycott fully established internationally
1992 – KWV quota system abandoned, granting winemakers greater creativity and flexibility to create quality wines of various depth and complexities
1994 – apartheid officially ends with the multi-racial democratic elections won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela
1994-now – huge increase in international demand for SA wines, as an affordable, quality commodity; this is reflected in the increased plantings of international varietals throughout the winegrowing regions of the Western Cape
More South Africa-oriented info hopefully to come over the next few weeks. Test on Tuesday.
Sources: Andre Domine’s WINE; wikipedia; and various (see links)
