It took a trip to South Africa to get me to fully wrap my mind around the hard-to-categorize South African wine scene. But I came back with an appreciation for the area's diversity and promise, the incredible beauty of the Cape winelands, the seriousness of the winemakers and the undervalued quality of many of its wines. I went down with an established affection for Iona's excellent Sauvignon Blancs and Mulderbosch's reliable rose. I came back devoted to so many more: Sadie Family, Raats, Boekenhoutskloof, Peter Finlayson, Vergelegen and Klein Constantia, not to mention the country's version of Champagned, Cap Classique, which is super-cheap and absolutely wonderful. (Also, Andrew Gunn of Iona has a great red blend and a pinot noir in the pipeline.)
Unfortunately, a lot of the best wines I tasted aren't easy to find here. The place where you'll find the greatest quantity of them is Union Square Wines. Go and take a look. For combining price and value, South Africa has few equals in the wine world. Here's the Edible Manhattan article:
Message in a Bottle
By Robert Simonson
Nothing about the South African wine industry is simple.
Start with their grapes. The country’s most widely planted white varietal is chenin blanc but, as in France, that grape wears many masks, from desert-dry to dessert-sweet, clean and crisp to dense and oxidized. Sparklers, too. The country’s best-known (but not most widely planted) red grape is pinotage, a cross between pinot noir and cinsault that’s grown almost nowhere else and despised as much as it is loved. The Cape Winelands are very old, and yet, the country’s categorized as a new-world wine region, its liquid bounty largely unknown to oenophiles until Apartheid fell. It’s a region that experiments with as many different grapes as any country in the world, despite being a beer- and brandy-drinking nation that largely ignores its own (ridiculously affordable) wines, exporting 50 percent of them elsewhere. This is a wine capitol that cannot even decide whether to say “syrah” or “shiraz.”
Stateside, this makes South African wine the face at the cocktail party that nobody can quite place. Even the savviest New York wine drinker’s mind can cloud over a bit when confronted with the South African section of the wine list (if, indeed, such a section exists). France is Bordeaux and Burgundy. Germany is riesling. California is cab and chard. And South African is…what, now?
