South Africa's best bottles
Having this evening finished an excellent bottle of Le Riche Cabernet Sauvignon 2001, I'm not at all surprised that Le Riche Reserve finished high in the list of Top Ten South African Reds. It's always a superb wine. This category, together with the Top Ten Whites, was the last that the team of panellists voted for recently (the voters are named with the Top 20 Wineries list - here).
Le Riche didn't win; it came joint third along with two Boekenhoutskloof wines: the Cabernet and the Syrah. The wine voted Top South African Red by the panel was Sadie Family Columella - a comparatively new wine (first vintage 2000) which just pipped one of the most enduring Cape reds, Kanonkop Paul Sauer. The next five followed in the Bordeaux-style blend line, with just one variety other than the Bordeaux lot getting a look-in. Each voter named ten wines in alphabetical order, and the results were arrived at simply by adding up the votes cast (same procedure for the white wines).
So the full Top Ten Reds lists was:
- Sadie Family Columella
- Kanonkop Paul Sauer
- Boekenhoutskloof Cabernet
Boekenhoutskloof Syrah
Le Riche Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve (these three tied) - Morgenster
- Vergelegen Red
- Meerlust Rubicon
- Bouchard Finlayson Galpin Peak Pinot Noir
Jordan Cobblers Hill (these two tied)
The Top Ten Whites (voting was closer than for the reds, with fewer strays) was also dominated by blends, with two very different styles and varietal packages coming joint top: Sadie Family Palladius and Cape Point Vineyards Isliedh. Three chardonnays (the Ataraxia a fraction behind the winners), just one chenin and - perhaps surprisingly - just one Sauvignon. The rest were blends. The surprise inclusion, perhaps (though I shouldn't be surprised as I voted for it myself), was Eben Sadie's "other" white Swartland blend, Sequillo - which sells for about a third of what Palladius does. The latest release of that, the 2009, is due out on May 1st. I tried it just the other day at a tasting organized by its distributor, Tracy van Maaren, and I have little doubt that it is the finest yet of this label - lean, lovely and lingering, beautifully textured and finely focused; should be a great food wine as well as a sipper.
The Top Ten South African Whites, in order of votes cast:
- Cape Point Vineyards Isliedh
Sadie Family Palladius (these two tied) - Ataraxia Chardonnay
Vergelegen White (these two tied) - Hamilton Russell Vineyards Chardonnay
- Tokara White
- Ken Forrester The FMC
- Chamonix Chardonnay
Sequillo White
Steenberg Sauvignon Blanc Reserve (these three tied)
Well, I hope Eben Sadie feels chuffed at having both the top red and the joint top white.
Incidentally, there were complaints of boringness when I previously put forward my own list of candidates, so here are some of the some slightly less usual suspects, which received at least two votes:
Reds:
- Herold Pinot Noir
- Raats Cabernet Franc
- Mvemve Raats De Compostella
- Lammershoek Roulette
- Simonsig Red Hill Pinotage
Whites:
- Boekenhoutskloof Semillon
- Nederburg Ingenuity
- Raats Chenin Blanc
- Sterhuis Astra
- Uva Mira Chardonnay
- Tim James's blog
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Re: South Africa's best bottles
Some superb wines, but in my experience some of those fare worse in blind tastings than when people see the hyped-up label...
Re: South Africa's best bottles
Google the great taste off between the USA and France. Check the results. Then we ask the question, based on ranking, what volumes are produced by all. Further, look at who has produced at that level for the most time, and all other variables, then get back to an average! Quality for how long versus great "rankings" for how long.(Stags leap do how many cases vs Mouton Rothschild?Kwispadoor makes a valid comment, blind, blind, blind!)
Re: South Africa's best bottles
to add, no hype, no prejudice etc. Thats all. But can we?
Blind & big
I'm not sure we need to get into the blind vs sighted debate here - but I do wonder why some people seem so determined that only one way of doing things is valid. Mark, apropos the US-France match - I presume you realise that all the wines selected to take part in that taste-off had been selected on the basis of their reputations rather than from blind tasting? Many of the wines listed here, incidentally, acquired their reputations partly via blind tastings (look at, eg, the ratings of the Sadie wines in magazines as far afield as US and Austria).
As to volumes, in a sense so what? Ferraris are made in smaller quantities than Mazdas, so should they be excluded from a Top Car competition? This was a poll about quality, not about a quality-quantity relationship. Bordeaux is one of the remarkably few places in the world where they can produce very large volumes of the highest quality and that's why it's arguably the greatest wine-producing area in the world - and that is partly to do with terroir, partly to do with having a great market for their top wines, with people willing to pay vast amounts for it.
Mark, you seem to keep on wanting this poll to be something that it isn't. I certainly don't think it answers all the useful questions about SA wine, or even most of them. It wasn't intended to. Why don't you let it serve its limited purpose and find it interesting? Or be a bit more constructive and make your own suggestions about where the judges went wrong instead of coming with all your abstract objections. Or do you think we should just look at the results in big blind-tasting competitions? If you think you'll find consistency there, I promise you'll spend a long time looking for it. You also won't find many of the country's most ambitious wines, as they don't enter - but I suppose that wouldn't matter because they're not made in large quanities?