Where to sit at a free-seating tasting is fraught with angst and pitfalls. On the one hand, you want to sit with your mates especially if Greg Landman is present to catch up on his fund of wicked jokes. On the other hand, sitting next to the winemaker can provide scoops galore, unguarded comments and groans. Sitting next to the proprietor is best left to the ambitious and late comers.

But yesterday, Angela Lloyd (below), queen of the old guard of SA wine amateurs (one is almost temped to pun the Pamela Vandyk Price of Pinelands), positioned herself firmly next to Antony Beck, not knowing that the most unexpected wine of the tasting was called Angela. Named after Ant’s wife, “a wonderful woman” as he told us twice.

And what a wonderful wine. For this was a terroir Pinot Noir from Oregon. Asked by winemaker Graham Weerts to introduce the 2012 Angela Estate Abbott Claim Pinot Noir, Ant became suddenly passionated, as they say in Burgundy. This wine is well named as drinking it is a religious experience and the fact that a Mr. Abbott once owned the 16 acre vineyard in the 1860s, is a happy coincidence.

Ant waxed lyrical about the site (“it looks just like Burgundy”) and the bad, almost English, weather. “It rains for 9 months a year. It is cold which results in true dormancy of fruit and very healthy vines. We have a window of 3 months to grow the grapes before the horrible weather returns.” Something his team did consummately well in 2012 for the upshot is a delicate, feminine, expression of Pinot. “You’re truly getting an experience of the earth.”

Angela Beck’s comments: “Antony, you know I don’t like Pinot.” Classic. But then this is a classic artisinal Pinot. The alternative route to vinous heaven than the one Ant treads with partner Barbara Banke in their JV Capensis Chardonnay made from grapes bought-in from three different sites in the Cape. The great white grape of Burgundy and the great red made in the New World. And Ant proclaims himself a “Bordeaux freak.” Pull the other one, as they say in the classics.