My return to South Africa

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Wine competitions are proliferating, but they have a problem. The leading producers don’t enter as they have nothing to gain and all to lose. Gold and silver medals serve, at best, to identify up-and-coming producers or established ones that are doing a better job than their peers.

Despite this, I enjoyed the annual Trophy Wine Show, which is organised by South Africa’s best-known wine writer Michael Fridjhon and team. It is not the country’s only wine competition, but it is certainly rigorous.

I’d been one of the overseas judges of the competition in 2003 (when I went with my mother-in-law) and 2007 (when I went without a sense of smell, which was interesting).

This year, I was persuaded to return in order to get a grasp of what’s happening in more mainstream South African wine than I generally taste in UK presentations, which can be dominated by the new-wave producers who have been shaking up the Cape wine scene over the past 10 years or so. Names such as Sadie, Mullineux, Rall and Savage were conspicuous by their absence from the list of competitors.

Fridjhon was especially keen that I should judge the 69 entries in the Shiraz/Syrah class so that I could see the progress. He argued that it had been the worst class back in 2007, because the vines tended to be young and winemakers “clueless” about how to handle their produce, resulting in a high degree of spoilage by brettanomyces infection, often called just “brett”. This is a yeast that can infect a barrel or even a whole winery, and imbues wine with aromas ranging from sticking plaster to something more animal than vegetable. We all vary in our susceptibility to it and in our exposure to it. At the Trophy Wine Show, as elsewhere, the younger the taster, the more intolerant of brett they were.

I can’t say that I remember every one of the South African Shirazes I tasted in 2007 but the 2023 class was decent enough, even if the vast majority seemed to be modelled more on full-bodied Australian Shiraz than on the arguably more fashionable fragrant style associated with the northern Rhône, where the grape is known as Syrah.

Many Cape wine regions may be too warm to produce fresh Syrahs, although I’d come across several the day before I started judging, when I toured Cape Agulhas wine country on the southernmost tip of Africa. One of my favourite Syrahs in the show was from there, Strandveld’s 2020, although, once the scores had been averaged, our panel of four tasters gave it only a silver medal, the others perhaps judging it too light. I hope a definitively South African style of Shiraz/Syrah will emerge, but I’m not sure I saw one when judging last month.

All four gold medals in this class (and three of the nine silvers) went to wines labelled Syrah as opposed to Shiraz, with two of them made in relatively cool regions. Villiersdorp winery is in the relatively new wine appellation Theewater, in the hills of the cool Cape South Coast region. Its 2020 Syrah was notably gentle on the palate rather than oak-dominated as some of them were.

Bloemendal’s Tyger Syrah, from a single vineyard in maritime Durbanville, was outstanding, but then it was a 2016 and as such one of the oldest wines in the blind tasting. The other two gold medals went to Old Road’s 12 Mile Syrah 2021 from Swartland and Oldenburg’s Stone Axe Syrah 2021 from Rondekop in the Banghoek Valley outside Stellenbosch.

My other two judging days were devoted respectively to Cabernet Sauvignons and Chardonnays with a few Pinot Noirs. South Africa has long been a source of great-value Chardonnay, cooled by ocean influence. This was the most successful white-wine class in the whole competition, being awarded five golds (all 2022s) and six silvers.

One popular choice was Bon Courage’s Unwooded Chardonnay from limestone-blessed Robertson in the Western Cape. It had seen no oak at all and sells for under €8 in Germany and the Netherlands.

The most intriguing appellation of all was Tradouw, in the Klein Karoo region, on Survivor winery’s delicious Cellar Master Series 2022 Chardonnay. The wine had slightly more residual sugar than most (3.7g/l) but that was well compensated for by the persistence and potential of this very well-made wine. The fruit comes from 15-year-old vines on the Tradouw-Joubert farm on the south western edge of the Klein Karoo. It’s a hot, dry region long associated with fortified wines, but these vines are at 700m and benefit from relatively good rainfall.

South African Pinot Noir is still very much a work in progress and we awarded no gold and just one silver medal, to Paul Cluver’s Estate Pinot Noir 2021 from cool Elgin.

As for the Cabernets tasted on the last day, we seem to have gone mad with the silverware, awarding 15 silver medals as well as four golds. South African vines have long suffered from leafroll virus, which can hinder full ripening, but the best wines showed no sign of this. Indeed one of our gold medals, Spier’s 2018 Cabernet, notched up 15 per cent alcohol. My favourite wine of all was Neil Ellis’s 2019 Cabernet-dominated Bordeaux blend from Stellenbosch, which also had a good tannic undertow but was definitely dry rather than sweet and less ripe in style than Spier’s.

The other two gold medallist Cabs were also from Stellenbosch, Louisvale’s Five Barrels 2020 which seemed fairly mature already, and Eikendal’s glamorous 2013 which has evolved beautifully yet still has something to give.

Lessons learnt were that Stellenbosch really does produce excellent Cabernet, that South African Chardonnay is a very safe bet, that South African wine in general is a steal, and that, while I miss my late mother-in-law, life really is better with a sense of smell.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Some international stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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