It’s not often that we open bottles of magnums in our house. Not only do few producers offer their wines in the 1,5 litre bottle, we haven’t made a point of seeking out and investing in wines bottled in that format. Recently, however, Philip took out a magnum of the 2000 Hartenberg Pontac to accompany the steak we had thrown on the Sunday evening braai.

As a variety, pontac is intriguing. Unlike many so-called black grapes whose flesh is white, pontac is distinctly red fleshed. It also found a home in South Africa and nowhere else, thanks to (probably) being imported to the Cape from South West France in the 1600s.

It doesn’t merit an entry in Oz Clarke and Margaret Rand’s Grapes & Wines, but Michael Fridjhon’s entry for The Oxford Companion to Wine refers to teinturier du Cher (teinurier means ‘dye’) which was originally grown in the Midi to add colour to pale wines. Today, the word teinturier is broadly applied to those varieties with red flesh, including alicante bouschet, gamay de bouze, dunkelfelder, rubired and saperavi.

In South Africa, pontac was often blended and usually fortified, either as a jerepigo or port-style wine. In 1992, when Hartenberg first bottled it as a single variety wine, it claimed that this was the first non-fortified bottling in South Africa, if not the world. As far as I know, this was never refuted; indeed, on http://www.winelabels.org/, Peter May writes that it is ‘the only pontac that is commercially available in the world’.

Some 10 years later in 2002, pontac (the 2000 vintage from Hartenberg) was bottled for the last time as a single variety. According to the estate’s Paddy Bomford, the vines were riddled with virus and struggling to ripen the crop. Today there’s less than 20 000 vines or 5.5 hectares remaining, and fewer than a handful of producers – Allesverloren, De Wet Co-op and Riebeek Cellers among them – still use it in their ports.  Pontac seems set to exit the wine stage.

Tasting note:
2000 Hartenberg Pontac: Opaque mulberry centre with a rim just beginning to brick. Forthcoming nose of mulberry jam, plums and prunes, and some tertiary notes; a little mushroom and damp dark earth. Fresh acidity, lots of fruit mid palate and a firm tannic farewell. Only 1165 magnums filled. Enjoyable; a legend, none left!