Pinotage. It’s one of those “love it or hate it” grapes. Actually, it seems to be more of a “hate it” grape. In the minds of many wine people of a certain age, Pinotage brings to mind notes of burnt rubber, iodine and the sort of old, stinky smoke that used to exist in New York bars when smoking was still allowed inside. This doesn’t reflect the true state of Pinotage today, and it was never the case for all Pinotage anyway, but the collective memory of the wine industry is long and stubborn and old tasting grid habits are hard to break. In any case, at the risk of jumping to quickly to the conclusion of this column, my belief is that you don’t in fact hate Pinotage...you just haven’t tasted the right one yet.
For readers who don’t take the amount of grape knowledge shoved into their brains as a point of pride, do note that Pinotage is not a typo or some new cool-kid slang for Pinot Noir. It’s a grape that remains relatively unique to South Africa, where it was created in 1925 as a crossing between the Pinot Noir grape and the Cinsault grape. Back then, Cinsault was called Hermitage, almost certainly making reference the famous hill – and later, a legally designated place name – in France’s Northern Rhône region. (Yes, yes, I know that today, a bottle of Hermitage will be made from the Syrah grape, but back then, there was almost certainly Cinsault sneaking into the blend.)
Why bother creating a new grape? Even way back when, Pinot Noir, with its ethereal aromatics and texture like silk or satin (or whatever your choice of high-end fabric) had a magical hold on winemakers. However, it’s a grape that doesn’t exactly thrive in hotter temperatures. So, if you’re in a relatively warm place and you want to make wines from Pinot Noir, you’re setting yourself up for some heartbreak. What then do you do? Cross it with Cinsault, a grape that takes very well to heat and drought! Voila… you can now make ethereal, lovely Pinot Noir-esque wines in a very warm climate! Theoretically at least.
This sort of crossing may have a whiff of Frankenstein about it, but it’s how any new grape variety is created, either in the wild, or as in the Pinotage case, in a vine nursery. Vines are pollinated, the seeds are grown, and fingers are crossed in hopes that the offspring vines yield something wonderful. But as with every offspring made by crossing two different gene pools, you’re never quite sure what you’ll get. This is why commercial vineyards are rarely planted from seeds…every vine would be different. Instead, the vine nursery takes cuttings of an existing vine, grafts those cuttings to some vine rootstock, lets them grow from a bit in a nice, warm cradle of a room, and then sends them out to be planted. Yes, it’s a little more complicated than this, but in short, nearly every vine in a vineyard has DNA that’s more or less identical to the vines next to it. We could really call them cloneyards.
But back to the specifics of Pinotage. I haven’t been around long enough to try any really, really old bottles from the initial rounds of vines and winemaking, so I don’t know how closely they came to meeting that original goal. When I first encountered the grape, which was over 15 years ago, Kanonkop was the gold standard produce,r. Their version of the grape was almost full-bodied, dark fruited, quite structured, firmly tannic, and with age—gained a compelling meatiness. There was a whiff of smokiness to it, but in a way that added complexity in the same way that oak might. Delicious, but more Tage than Pinot.
There were also Cape Blends, with Pinotage taking a key role in a blend, often with Bordeaux varieties, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, and sometimes with Syrah. Many were delicious, some were not, but none of them reminded me much of Pinot Noir.
It wouldn’t be until a few years later that I would taste Pinotage that really showed its Pinot Noir-y side. Bottles such as Warwick First Lady and FRAM with their use of whole bunch fermentation and light-touch extraction techniques let that side of the grape’s family tree shine. Floral aromatics, pretty red fruits, floaty silk-scarf textures were fully on display.
Over in South Africa in 2016, I tried many more Pinotage wines and could really dive into how winemaking impacted style. Over there, this light-touch winemaking seemed to be much more common than it was stateside, where most of what we were getting seemed to be modeled on the Kanonkop style, which from the taste of it, was much harder to pull off. (I also was introduced to the coffee Pinotage, which tasted like, you guessed it, very rich, dark, almost chocolate-y espresso, but that’s a story for another time.)
On that trip, there was much discussion about where the “classic” notes of rubber and iodine came from – even as those specific notes were less evident in the wines than they had ever been before. Leaf roll virus? Flavor compounds lurking in the grape skin and released by certain extraction techniques or fermentation temperatures? Something to do with the soil? There may be a research paper out there somewhere explaining it all – if so, please send it to me.
Whatever the reasons, on that trip, and in the years since, more and more of these lovely Pinot-esque Pinotages have been making their way into the US market. Or maybe those are the only versions that make their way in front of me. Just yesterday, at a Wines of South Africa lunch, I couldn’t stop pouring myself tastes of the Scions of Sinai Pinotage Atlantikas Maritime Bushvines. It was the sole red wine on the table, and it was exactly the wine for a 90+ degree day: etherial florals, tart red and purple fruits, a touch of earth, delicate and juicy and oh so silky.
Sort of like Pinot Noir. You might even think they’re related!
