South African Wines Step Onto the Stage(1)
FORGIVE me if I’m excited, but I can’t help it. I want to tell you straight out that South
Africa, of all places, is one of the greatest sources for moderately priced cabernet sauvignon on the planet today.
I suspected this before, but after the wine panel tasted 25 South African cabernets recently, I can say it unequivocally, without the usual hedging and qualifications.
Well, almost, but I’ll get to that later.
First I want to focus on the exciting news. If you like cabernets that are balanced, with a sense of structure and shape, that are indisputably cabernet sauvignon with flavors of cassis and violets, cedar and minerals, then you are going to love these wines.
In bottle after bottle, including one to which the panel gave a rare top rating of four stars, the defining characteristic was balance. These wines were not over-the-top fruit bombs, although, yes, we did find a few of those. Nor were they soft, plush and syrupy. They demonstrated power, but they also showed finesse. It would be a pleasure to serve our favorites with all sorts of different foods.
It would be tempting to characterize these wines as more Bordeaux than California, but I think that’s too easy. A more accurate and meaningful comparison would be to liken these wines to Napa Valley cabernets of 25 to 30 years ago, a time before so many California producers began picking grapes that were riper than ripe, thus producing Napa red rather than Napa cabernet.
These wines would never be called weedy or thin, although some California producers might sneer at them as “green,” simply because, like Bordeaux and an earlier generation of Napa cabernets, they offer herbal flavors like mint, sage and thyme. In my opinion, these flavors are not only appropriate but even delicious within the cabernet spectrum.
Not that we found any of our South African wines harking back to the bygone days of 12.5 percent alcohol.
No, these are potent bottles, most of them around 14 to 14.5 percent alcohol. But because they are so well balanced, they don’t feel too big. Nor do they feel self-important or grandiose — not at these prices, which are decidedly moderate by Napa standards. For the tasting, by the way, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Paul Grieco, an owner of Hearth, Insieme and Terroir in Manhattan, and Rebecca Foster, a representative with Empire Merchants, a distributor.
South Africa is not exactly the first country that comes to mind when one is thinking of good wine, at least not among Americans. In fact, many people do not associate South Africa with wine at all, which might be somewhat surprising when you consider that wine has been made there for hundreds of years.
We’re more concerned with recent history, and for much of the second half of the 20th century, when wine exploded as a global commodity, South African wines were largely off limits to the rest of the world because of the country’s apartheid policies.
In a way, the resurrection of the South African wine industry is analogous to the rebirth of wine producing in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There’s been a lot of catching up in a very short time.
South Africa has caught up, and how. Just consider our No. 1 wine, the 2004 Stellenbosch cabernet from De Trafford, which we awarded a top score of four stars.
“Hallelujah!” exulted Paul, who found aromas of cedar and tobacco in the glass and declared it a wine of “absolute terroir.” Florence and Rebecca both concurred, finding it rich yet graceful and structured. I was a touch more hesitant in my assessment (but only a touch) because of the ripeness of the fruit. But in the end the structure dominated the power, giving the wine shape and agility. A price of $32 for a wine like this makes it a great deal.
If it had been only one wine that impressed us so much, we would not have been nearly so excited. But there were plenty of others, like our No. 2, the 2004 Stellenbosch cabernet from Rust en Vrede, a balanced, well-shaped wine with beautiful aromas of flowers, fruit, minerals and herbs, and our No. 3, the 2003 One Stroke One from Stellenbosch, which balanced lightness with intensity. In South Africa, by the way, One Stroke One goes by the name of its producer, Graceland Vineyards. In the United States, I guess, Elvis got there first.
