As seen on www.aminuteofwine.com, I talk about Rocking the Daisies and Daisy Darling:

We have become regular visitors to Stanford, a village about 15 minutes’ drive beyond Hermanus. The main street, with its typically platteland (country) architecture, is dominated by the steepled Dutch Reformed Church – much like a French village, actually, except that the church is not Gothic. In the side streets one can find some pretty houses from a vaguely Victorian era.

Additionally, dozens of houses have been built in the past 10 years, or so. Fortunately for all concerned, Stanford appears to have been adopted by city dwellers with a slightly alternative and more creative bent. One would loosely describe these newer houses as low-budget Cape vernacular, and they hang together quite well.

Sadly, most of the construction in Hermanus (as with just about every coastal town in South Africa) is the most grotesque mish-mash imaginable. Stanford has clearly dodged a bullet.

I arrived in Stanford last night, just in time to join the rest of the group in attending a cabaret-type show by Angels on Horseback. At first I couldn’t believe that a group of sane-looking young people would want to put on a country and western show, but we soon warmed to them. The highlights were Jamie Jupiter’s covers of a couple of Johnny Cash numbers and their performance of the parody song Can’t Buy a Dildo in Texas.

One of the good things about Stanford is its proximity to a number of high-quality wine producers, the nearest of which is Raka. Having knocked back the complimentary Glendower whisky on arrival (very nice), we got stuck into a bottle of Raka’s Quinary, which went down well. The real find of the evening, though, was a Bordeaux-style blend from Hermanuspietersfontein, called Kleinboet. At R99 on the wine list of the Stanford Arms it is one of the most amazing wine bargains I have ever bought. It was so delicious that – despite our advanced state of inebriation – we felt compelled to buy another bottle. By this point they’d picked up a pricing error, but even at R120 it was still a bargain.

Kleinboet is an affectionate Afrikaans word meaning “little brother” and it is so named because it is the understudy to a wine they call Arnoldus. Given our experience of Kleinboet, Arnoldus must be pretty damn amazing.

Hermanuspietersfontein was the original name for Hermanus, thankfully shortened by a prescient postmaster. The wines are made by Bartho Eksteen, who is one of the more eccentric of the ‘interesting’ people who have made the choice to become winemakers. One can’t dispute, though, that he makes really, really good wine. Interestingly, the label copy for all their wines is in Afrikaans only (an extension of the winemaker’s quirkiness, perhaps?).

Hermanuspietersfontein (the winery) has become known as HPF (clearly Hermanuspietersfontein is a name that is destined never to stick). The touch of marketing man Gerrie Heyneke is evident in their excellent website http://hpf1855.co.za – for all the doubts that Afrikaans back labels may raise about their ability to communicate, the website is attractive, easy to navigate and tells the story well.

Kleinboet and I are getting on slightly less well this morning, but I have no doubt that the friendship will be rekindled soon.

I have a friend who says Puritan when he means to say purist, and penultimate when something is the best ever. The depth of our friendship is such that I would never point out his error; I do, after all, know what he means. Nevertheless, my purist heart cringes very slightly every time he mangles his mother tongue.

To purist coffee drinkers, Starbucks is the devil incarnate. I’m not going to get into an argument about the merits of various coffee chains, but I will say that the Starbucks in Qingdao was a very welcome sight when I was there in April last year. For all the brand’s ills it succeeds in delivering a consistent experience wherever one goes.

Given the ubiquity of Starbucks it is not unexpected that The Widow, who used to write a column for Grape.co.za, used it as a slightly pejorative nickname for Bertus Fourie, the winemaker who created “the original coffee Pinotage”, Diemersfontein. Fourie thereafter moved to KWV, where he made Café Culture, and has since moved on to Val de Vie, for whom he is making Barista (the names, clearly, are broadcasting the coffee-ness of the Pinotage in the bottle). For the record, I’m sure The Widow was a purist – she was too interested in wine to have been a Puritan.

Similarly, I am too much of a purist wine drinker to be able to like any of these coffee concoctions. Firstly, despite my addiction to coffee I cannot abide mocha flavours. Secondly, every coffee Pinotage I’ve tasted has been clumsy and sweet on the palate.

Oak, of course, is the only external flavouring agent permitted during winemaking. The coffee flavour in these Pinotages comes from the mocha-type flavour of the toasted oak staves used during fermentation. On the other hand – in an apparent contradiction – the influence of oak on the great wines of Bordeaux, Burgundy, or just about anywhere else in the world is very much more acceptable to aficionados.

I’m not a big supporter of the flavour wheel (read my previous comments here), but I do find it rather amusing that purists (many of whom do taste by flavour wheel) object to a winemaker going to great lengths to make a wine taste more like a specific part of the flavour wheel. The style clearly sells extremely well, but I can’t help thinking that this kind of winemaking has more to do with the contemporary popularity of cocktails – most of them overly sweet – than with the finest traditions of winemaking.

The problem for Pinotage is that it’s a variety that is desperately struggling for some kind of cohesive and sustainable expression. Is it suitable for making what the French call vins de garde, suitable for long term cellaring? Is it better off as an attractively fruity wine to be consumed in its youth? Or is the market vote – of which there clearly is one – for coffee Pinotage going to trump all others?

It is at this point that I can imagine The Widow postulating that if Starbucks (the winemaker) were to change employers sufficiently frequently he could single-handedly be responsible for an entire industry changing the way it vinifies a grape variety. An effect no different to globalisation, perhaps. She might even go on to say that it’s a wine made for pallets (as in the type that the cartons get loaded onto for shipping to the market), rather than palates.

In the same way that Starbucks (the coffee brand) is preparing the Asian market for future commercial endeavours by operators that make better coffee, is it possible that coffee Pinotages could play a role in switching consumers from cocktails to wine? Is coffee Pinotage made for people who may write a tasting note along the lines of “gr8t!!!!”? Would they ever be able to drink a Pinotage made in any other style? So many vexing questions.

A bottle of coffee Pinotage is a vinous malapropism of sorts. It’s a red wine made from Pinotage grapes, but it conveys a very different meaning than a more conventional Pinotage (whatever that may be). My commercial and marketing side can understand what they’re doing. Now I need to work on my taste buddies.

Some of the corks from previous Women's Day Lunches

South Africa has 12 public holidays, which theoretically means we have an extra day off every month of the year. However, it doesn’t quite work out that way, because of a concentration of holidays around March and April. We’re also really good at watching the calendar, so when a holiday falls on a Thursday it’s an open invitation to take Friday off work and turn the whole thing into a bonus long weekend. When holidays fall on Sundays we get the Monday off.

If the country – and by that I mean our economy – is really unlucky the March-April period will have several holidays falling midweek. Then newspapers carry stories about how much this productivity interruption is costing the country. I can’t say I entirely understand how one calculates this in an environment where unemployment is as high as it is here. If the economy were running at full capacity (which it isn’t) there would be a cost as a result of lost production or overtime pay.

I’m sure South Africans aren’t very different to the nationals of any other country around the world, in that few people pay much attention to the issue or person being commemorated. Whether one calls them public holidays or bank holidays the nett effect is the same – they’re a perfect excuse to have a long lunch with friends.

Pink berets for the military?

We didn’t – in all honesty – expect our friends to stay quite as late as midnight when we invited them around for lunch on 9 August 1995, the first instalment of National Women’s Day (commemorating the 1956 march by 20 000 women on the Union Buildings). It was an epic day that involved numerous plates of food, much laughter and very much more wine – so much, in fact, that one of our number tried (and failed) several times to get to work the next day. When he did finally make it he was incapable of doing anything other than lie under his desk with his tie over his eyes while his boss brought him tea and dry toast. Another guest was the producer in charge of a multi-million rand film shoot, but was unable to budge from the minibus. Except for the year when I did a passable impersonation of a first year university student, by depositing the contents of my stomach on the streets of Grahamstown, those heights (or should I say depths) have not been reached again.

The principle of the Annual National Women’s Day Lunch is fairly simple. The lunch rotates between four hosting couples. The hosts invite four guests, bringing the total to 12. Each guest brings at least one bottle of wine, conforming to the credo “only Grand Cru will do”. Initially this was read to mean Grand Cru Burgundy, but is now taken to include Cru Classé from Bordeaux, as well as wine from any other region in the world which can be regarded as being similarly iconic. Everybody brings reserve bottles, and the host may well supplement from his own stocks during the course of the day as the need arises.

Sunday was the 15th instalment of the ANWDL. Eleven guests (one had to pull out at the last minute) made their way through a fantastic line-up of wines. I’m not going to list, nor comment on each wine, but there were a few notable moments.

Le Menu

Before I get to those, I need to add that no-one has advance knowledge of the menu. Everyone pitches up with these amazing wines; there’s a short discussion over serving order, and then we get on with it. Tasting all those wines is much like the excitement of opening presents on Christmas Day.

The second course was rehydrated salt cod in a rich sauce of red wine and black olives. Some people had held back their La Doriane (a Condrieu from Guigal), which proved that white wine and fish are not necessarily a felicitous match. On the other hand, the 2004 Syrah from Du Mol (Russian River) was fantastic with the fish, largely due to its savoury character that was almost olive-like in its minerality. Poured at the same time was the very fine Jim Barry McCrae Wood Shiraz 2001, which didn’t work as well with the food perhaps due to it being more fruity than savoury.

Food could not be blamed, though, for the disappointing performance of the 2006 Corton-Bressandes from Domaine Jacques Prieur. In my view this wine was Grand Cru only in name; the finish was short and the overall impression of the wine rather dilute. Seeing this bottle the host then reached into his own stocks and produced a bottle of the 1996 vintage of the same wine. This was an entirely different creature, a worthy representative of the appellation.

Another highlight was a half-litre of Solera 1928 Maury, a sweet, fortified, sherry-style red wine. There is not sufficient space here to go into the detail of its manufacture, which in any case is told so well by Jancis Robinson (read it here ). This wine blew me away. Sure, I wouldn’t (couldn’t) drink more than a glass at a time, but its deliciousness was a joy. And to think that were it not for a wine merchant poking his nose around where most people wouldn’t bother, the world would never have experienced this delight.

The line-up of wines

Considering the length of time it has taken to make the Solera Maury – and how delicious it is – it could justifiably be sold for very much more money. Furthermore, it is unlikely that anyone would ever embark on a commercial exercise to make such wines ever again, so it makes sense to stock up now.

The first little bit of wine I tasted, when I was about three or four years old, was a muscadel jerepigo made by my grandmother, Margaret de Wet (née Farrington). While I then had no idea of the significance of a woman running a large-scale farming operation in the late 1960s, fortified wines have pressed a special button for me ever since.

My grandmother was an amazing woman. When my grandfather died unexpectedly she had the responsibility of four children, of which my mother – then 15 years old – was the oldest. She politely declined the offers made by neighbours to farm on her behalf, choosing instead to take on the challenge herself.

In the early 1960s that was not the kind of thing that women did, but she pulled it off. Despite thumbing her nose at convention she didn’t want to stifle her sons, nor to subject them to the indignity of working under their mother. As soon as they’d finished studying she moved off the farm, leaving them (in their early twenties) to get on with making an even greater success of the operation.

I’ve often thought how selfless an act this was. When she moved off the farm she was in her early fifties – from a career perspective in the prime of her life.

This bottle of Maury came from a barrel that was first filled when my grandmother was a child, and topped up solera-style in the decades since then. While it was unquestionably coincidental that someone elected to bring this bottle it gave me cause to toast a remarkable woman.

Even in our reverie there was reverence. The broader essence of the day was not lost.

I have a friend who once a year holds what he calls a Cellar Rationalisation Party (CRP). This gathering not only does double-duty as his birthday celebration, but is also a useful outlet for wines that he describes as being “well past their rack life or of a style that we no longer choose to drink” (CRaP?).

It has become my practice to open every single bottle to ensure that we are not faced with the prospect of being forced to drink it twelve months hence. Over the years the quality of the wines has leapt considerably, with the result that there are fewer marginal bottles on offer. Clearly we have done our work well at previous parties, in weeding out the dreck!

Much of what is done and said at the CRP is probably best left unreported. However, I do want to share my observation of the several dozen reds that I tasted (OK, some I drank) on Sunday. It should also be said that I’m quite a critical drinker – hopefully more in the ‘kritikos’ sense of the word – so I tend to move through the wines rather rapidly until I find ones I want to drink.

It was when I reached the 2001 Welgemeend that I had a moment of epiphany. Here was a beautifully structured, very well-balanced wine that wasn’t trying to shout its way over the noise of its competitors. Rather, it was presenting its charms modestly, without any trace of ego, and was so much the better for it. The same could not be said of many of the other wines on the table, some of which were more a reflection of the budget available to purchase new barrels than anything else.

I never met Billy Hofmeyr, who helped pioneer Bordeaux-style blends in South Africa in the 1970s, but I had numerous contacts with his daughter Louise, who took over from him when ill-health ended his winemaking career. In a sense, the 2001 Welgemeend is very much like Louise – attractive, down-to-earth and not someone to draw attention to herself.

One may not say the same about Michel Rolland, who is the consultant behind Remhoogte’s Aigle Noir, a shiraz, cabernet, merlot, pinotage blend. It was interesting to compare this wine with others on the table. While it is undoubtedly to some extent a formula wine it succeeds in delivering a most enjoyable experience. It is not a wine that imposes itself. There’s plenty of fruit and oak, but it’s all in balance.

Two different approaches. Both of them successful.

There are many who would argue that Michel Rolland’s formulae disallow the expression of terroir; that the wines are more a reflection of him than they are of a unique sum of climate and soil. That may be valid, but it says a lot for his sensitivity to varying conditions that his methods can lead to the making of successful wines in such disparate locations.

Making the wine is only one small part of the process. It also needs to be sold profitably, which requires a proactive marketing effort. While the sincere effort to make enjoyable wine and the ability to market it effectively are not necessarily mutually exclusive, it must be very much harder for those who prefer not to shout from the mountaintops. The Hofmeyrs made very much nicer wines than most of the big-budget newcomers. It’s a shame they’ve been ‘rationalised’ out of the industry.