MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Pinotage is about to have a big moment
Cultivars come and go, but Grande Pinotage may finally change our thinking about the Cinderella of Cape wine
There is a tide in the affairs of men, says Brutus to Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. The same is true for grape cultivars, making some more fashionable than others and nudging growers to often disastrous investments as they try to catch the wave.
Consider chenin blanc, once the workhorse white of the Cape wine industry, useful for everything from brandy to sparkling wine, prone to generous yields, condemned once to perpetual ordinariness. No-one in the early 1990s would have had the temerity to suggest that the Western Cape would host the International Chenin Blanc Congress in November 2022. Faced with long established and prestigious French appellations — Vouvray, Savennieres, Clos de la Coulée de Serrant, Jasnières — who could have imagined that a Stellenbosch wine called Mevrou Kirsten would upstage vineyards whose reputation dates back to the 12th century?..
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