Pieter de Klerk reports on a remarkable tasting of South African semillons going back to 1997.

Last night I attended an event where we tasted some of South Africa's best currently available Sémillons (seven very diverse wines from vintages 2005 to 2008). I found only one of them to be truly outstanding: the 2007 Cape Point Vineyards. Knowing how well our Sémillons age, I presume that this gorgeous wine, but also the other less impressive ones, will become better with age.

This, and reading Tim James' fascinating article on red Sémillon, made me think of a most special tasting that my wine club, The Noble Rotters, held in January this year (conducted blind, as always) . Below is the report I wrote afterwards.

The standard of this tasting was mind curling and toe boggling, with a sky-high average of 16.71! All the producers can be rightly proud of their wines. I mean, just imagine the iconic 2003 Vergelegen White coming in last spot...! Its score of 15.69 would have made it victorious in some other tastings. I'll stick my head out and say that this was the best tasting of SA whites I have ever been to in 17 years of tasting wine - a privilege indeed. And, together with clearing our palates at the start with a 1996 Simonsig Kaapse Vonkel MCC and rounding off the post-tasting dinner with a 2000 Cape Point Vineyards Semillon Noble Late Harvest, the tasting also provided conclusive proof that SA's whites can age with distinction - provided your selection and maturation is spot on. It was also great to experience the full merits of both the more Chardonnay-ish (oxidative, woody, extracted) and the more Sauvignon-like (reductive, elegant, pyrazine-brushed) styles of Sémillon.

Out of all these fantastic wines, a clear winner emerged: 2000 Fairview Oom Pagel Semillon (17.56 points average). One of the most impressive things concerning this wine was its individuality - you will not easily taste anything like it. The enticing deep, gold colour could not prepare you for the nasal attack: intense and open, it was congested with waxy smoked salmon; apricot & peach jam; all sorts of citrus fruits; minerals; aromatic spices; apple cider and dried cherries on a well-integrated frame of (by now) subtle wood. Having been treated more like a Chardonnay, it's age brought about a luxurious flor (fino sherry) tone on the palate. Some dusty cedar and caramel represented the wooding, while many of the aromas flowed over to the palate, including baked peaches. The highish alcohol was sufficiently balanced by an overall broad-shouldered wine.

The fantastic track record that Constantia Uitsig has for Sémillon was underlined by their 2000 Reserve garnering second spot at 17.3 points, outdoing in the process the much-gonged 2001 vintage (ninth spot at 16.69). The 2000 reflected the warm vintage and hovered somewhere in-between the two mentioned stylistic directions - shrewd winemaking (in Steenberg's cellar) in a less-than-perfect white wine vintage.

Young vineyards and a crappy vintage didn't prevent Dirk Human from making a cracking 2005 Sémillon at Black Oystercatcher. Veering decidedly more to the Sauvignon-style, it was brimming with minerals (including some terroir-driven gravel) and pyrazines, with fantastic balance in a complex and expressive, but elegant package.

Fourth place was shared between my personal top two Sémillons of the tasting, a 2003 Cape Point Vineyards and a 1997 Klein Constantia. The CPV was, like always, simply pure unadulterated class. The KC was originally made as a once-off vintage for the CWG auction. We were lucky to pick up the wine when re-released some years later (same wine, normal KC label). If Bull Terriers came in methoxypyrazine flavour, one of those would be descriptive of what stormed out of the glass! Very unusual in the SA context, the wine is high in natural acid and extremely low in alcohol. The very cool 1997 vintage provided European ripening conditions in Constantia and this wine has never looked or tasted even remotely close to its advanced age. The only way I've ever spotted its vintage on previous tastings was by spotting the wine first.

Between the three Nitidas, one might have expected the cool vintage 2003 to be the best - and it was. The hot 2005 vintage surprised by trumping the 2004, but all three underlined Nitida's unmistakeable quality and especially value.

Thanks to John who unearthed the very special final wine (N/V Stony Brook Rose de Vert, the only wine not tasted in random order), made from red-skinned - yes, read it again - Sémillon. One of the weirder wines you can come across, it ended up being rather fantastic! The owners of Stony Brook reckon this non-vintage is probably close to a 1999.

In a perfect world, someone might have brought an old Boekenhoutskloof, Rijk's and Steenberg, but picking bones about this tasting would be downright silly.

RESULTS, 31 January 2009 (Old Sémillon):

1.  2000 Fairview Oom Pagel:  17.56
2.  2000 Constantia Uitsig Reserve:  17.3
3.  2005 Black Oystercatcher:  17.22
4.  2003 Cape Point Vineyards:  17.14
5.  1997 Klein Constantia:  17.11
6.  2003 Nitida:  16.9
7.  2005 Nitida:  16.88
8.  N/V Stony Brook Rose de Vert:  16.87
9.  2001 Constantia Uitsig Reserve:  16.69
10. 2001 Fleur du Cap Unfiltered:  16.11
11. 2004 Stellenzicht Reserve:  15.9
12. 2004 Nitida:  15.83
13. 2003 Vergelegen White:  15.69

For a bit of interesting déjà vu, below are the wines and scores of a tasting we held (to the exact day) five years previously. Apart from other variants, we had a different mix of tasters for these two tastings, but despite this, the numbers still seem to add credence to Sémillon's ageability.

RESULTS, 31 January 2004 (Sémillon and Viognier, with wines that appeared again five years later in bold):

1.   2000 Fairview Oom Pagel Sémillon:  15.96
2.   1997 Klein Constantia Sémillon:  15.88
3.   1998 Constania Uitzicht Reserve Sémillon:  15.67
4.   2003 Steenberg Sémillon:  15.58
5.   2002 Boekenhoutskloof Sémillon:  15.55
6.   2002 Brampton Viognier:  15.17
7.   2000 Constantia Uitsig Reserve Sémillon:  15.00
8.   1998 Stellenzicht Reserve Sémillon:  14.54
9.   2003 Uitkyk De Waal Viognier:  14.25
10. 2001 Fairview Sémillon:  14.17
11. 2002 Fairview Viognier:  13.95
12. 1998 Nederburg Auction Reserve Sémillon:  13.27
13. 2001 Fairview Sémillon  (CORKED)

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