Does the best Chenin Blanc in SA really cost R35? That’s what the Toasty Show of wine importer and Riedel stemware SA agent Mike Fridjhon would have you believe. So while British Masters of Wine howl about naive judges on the interwebs and stamp their tiny digital feet, we’re embracing terroir and will be refocusing our bi-monthly WellsFaber Sommelier Selections on tasting appellations at the Cape Town Club in Queen Victoria Street. An unbeatable address for snobs and musical folk.

Of course I’ve been doing this for years, being co-author of the leading Portuguese wine guide. Tasting will be blind, of course. My forward to this year’s edition of The People’s Guide.

Fingerprints of flavour

After five years tasting Portuguese wine blind for the People’s Guide, some things are starting to

stick. Like the violet aromas of Touriga Nacional and the herbal flavours of Aragonez. Such

flavours are unique to Portuguese wine. In South Africa our Sauvignons Blanc are more green

spectrum flavours while our Cabernets Sauvignon often have a character of tomato paste. The

fancy word for this is terroir, which is why we taste Portuguese wines within their appellations.

What a boring world of wine it would be if every red was a spicy Shiraz or every white an oaky

Chardonnay, the so-called “international varietals.” Before coming to Portugal to taste, I was

judging a wine competition in Bulgaria. How sad to see indigenous grapes like Mavrud being

replaced with Merlot. But then if the wine is being exported, as most of the top end Bulgarians

are, the preferences of the customer dictate the style these days. The customer is always right,

even in a wine shop.

This trend to expected flavours is pernicious and not to be encouraged by the wine lover. While

consumers expect Coca Cola to taste the same in Coimbra as in Chicago it’s surely not the

same when it comes to wine. Each appellation has its own fingerprints of flavour, an identikit

that tells you “Alentejo” or “Dao” even when you don’t know the producer or the brand. The

particular grape varieties used are the start of this regional identity and are often geographically

constrained.

This is not the case in South Africa, where Chenin Blanc is like a weed, it grows everywhere

and it takes a while to learn that if there is an abundance of fresh acidity it more than likely

comes from a maritime appellation while if the tannins are evident the grapes were likely grown

on a mountain. Likewise Cabernet grows all over and one wine estate can produce wines in

many styles: Champagnes, “Ports”, Rhone and Bordeaux blends, Chenin as if from the Loire

and dessert wines as sweet as Sauternes.

As part of this impulse to offer something to eveybody, at long last South African producers are

discovering “Cape Portuguese blends.” By which they mean wines made from Tinta Barocca – a

grape mistakenly planted in the Karoo desert by a winemaker who mistook it for Shiraz – and the

other great grapes of the Douro: Tinta Roriz, Tinta Francisca and of course Touriga Nacional. In

the white department Verdelho is starting to appear and the first Alvarinos have been made in

the Hemel en Aarde Valley.

As they say in the classics “imitation is the most sincere form of flattery” and if this is true then

South African winemakers are mad about Portuguese wines. But then with the South African

restaurant chain Nando’s now serving peri-peri chicken all over the world, we’re clearly very

good at flattering our Portuguese brothers and sisters in this wonderful world of food and wine.