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I know quite a few people in the wine trade who despise Pinotage, and it’s certainly not a grape that you often hear people rave about. Until now. With one exception they were really delicious wines and tasting them gave us a real boost. We were lifted high by the evening, and not because of the alcohol. I think the reason that it has a bad reputation is that it’s a grape that really minds about how its treated, and since a lot of the early wines that came across from South Africa were on the cheap side, the poor old vines had been driven to produce as many grapes as possible, to increase volume which, as we know, decreases quality. The wines we tasted showed what can be achieved if you look after your vines and cut down on volume.
Our favourite wine was Diemersfontein 2006, which is £7.99 from Waitrose. This was bound to happen. We were an all girl panel on that night and the wine smells and tastes so ridiculously like mocha, that I’m surprised it didn’t get even higher marks. I’m sure if you analysed the aroma and flavour against that of chocolate or coffee they’d be as close as us and gorillas. A great wine to buy for a girls’ night in. As the evening wore on the smell was exactly, I mean exactly, like coffee creams. We were reminded of walking into a real coffee shop. The taste was like coffee creams, with a toasted coffee finish. Almost a dessert wine.
Back to the wines that tasted like wine and Beyerskloof Synergy 2004, which is £8.99 from Tesco, was delicious. It smelt like very ripe brambles and was dry in the mouth, but with fruit as well. Really a much better wine than the Diemersfontein, but women are women and when faced with a coffee/chocolate flavoured wine, they are helpless to resist.
The Bay 2003, which is only £5.99 from the Co-op, was the best buy of the evening. It smelt of blackcurrant, oak, plain chocolate and spices. I immediately gave it top marks for smell, because it was so appealing. The taste was a perfect balance between oak and ripe fruit. It had a dry, plain chocolate finish.
Stormhoek 2006, which is £5.99 from Waitrose, had a pretty simple smell of redcurrant or cranberry, which faded. The taste was reasonable, with sweet fruit and a coffee/chocolate finish.
Cape Grace Pinotage/Merlot 2006, which is £4.49 from Waitrose, was less fragrant than others and was hot, dry and spirity in the mouth. Not bad, but not in the same league as the others. Our least favourite, oddly, was the Beyerskloof straight Pinotage 2005, which is £5.99 from Majestic and Sainsbury. It was pretty stinky – like rotting fruit, and in the mouth there was no fruit. Lorraine said she couldn’t mark it because it was so horrible. Even if we had taken her out of the equation, because she really doesn’t like Pinotage, every single one of the panel gave this wine the lowest marks, by quite a margin.