Marvelous Marius

The first thing that jumped out and hit me between the nostrils from a glass of Beanotage 2010, Marius Malan’s attempt at the wildly popular coffee/mocha style of Pinotage, was vanilla. Which comes as no surprise, as toasted oak staves rich in vanillin define this popular style.

Marius Malan @ Bizerca Bistro last month

Marius Malan @ Bizerca last month

Oak barrels have been used to mature red (and increasingly white) wine for centuries and the flavours of oak have become so pervasive, when you taste an unwooded Cabernet or Chardonnay, it’s as unfamiliar as tonic without gin. Accountants led the charge from expensive imported barrels to cost efficient oak staves, a financial flight than ended in discount woodchips in giant tea bags. Clearly flavour had overtaken the storage function of barrels.

Vanilla plays a starring role in these coffee/mocha style concoctions, especially popular among young drinkers, whose preference for a sweet palate is well established. As balding Food God Heston Blumenthal, who took Cape Town by storm last month, told New Statesman magazine it’s all a question of “learned association – vanilla smells sweet, yet sweetness doesn’t have a smell; it’s a taste, and taste happens in the mouth. If you chew a vanilla pod, you will find that it’s as bitter as coffee. The only reason we think vanilla smells sweet is that we grew up with it in ice cream, cakes and biscuits. If you want to reduce sugar in a dessert, you can spray a tiny spritzer of vanilla over it and create the perception of more sweetness.”

Ryan Puttick prefers his oak in chip form for the Ja Mocha Pinotage 2010 he makes for Simonsvlei International. This Rasta red has ten times as much toasted oak as a normal wood matured version and the intense smoky vanilla notes are unmistakeable.

When Ryan launched his South Atlantic brand last month, a sunset cruise on the Nautillus in the direction of the South Atlantic made sense. The southern ocean has long been a favoured testing ground for new products: when the SA military and Israel wanted to test drive their atomic bomb JV back in 1979, they sailed to the South Atlantic and set one off. POW! The press were not invited, but the bhangmeters of Vela Hotel, a sneaky American satellite hanging voyeuristically around, observed the tell-tale “double flash” of a nuclear detonation and the game was on.

Our test voyage got as far as Clifton, before dropping anchor off Fourth Beach to eat lamb on a skewer while gazing at abandoned bungalows on the beach, their millionaire owners having made like swallows and returned to their European perches. All their toilets had doors, I was pleased to observe.

Whites were the pick of the bunch for me – a floral Sauvignon Blanc 2010 made from explosive Banghoek grapes and a steely Chardonnay 2009 with fresh citrus notes that coped admirably with the chili dip for the vegetable spring rolls that emitted the tell-tale Vela “double flash” on the taste buds. Both wines are available countrywide from Pick ‘n Pay supermarkets at under R70 a pop.