Pinotage

This isn't exactly new territory for us, having written about Pinotage here several times, but we just got in a case of Ken Forrester Petit Pinotage so we might as well plug it.  

One of our favorite wine comments of all time has to be - Cheap Pinot Noir ought to be illegal.  No beating around the bush there.  If you want Pinot Noir, the most magical of wine grapes, you're gonna have to pay for it.  Ain't no two ways about it.  So what's a pinot guy on a budget supposed to do?

Well, you find alternatives.  Like other lighter reds that have enough finesse to reach the quality threshold you need.  Italy is a good place to start.  Or southern France.  Or maybe, just maybe, South African Pinotage.  

Why would we hesitate with Pinotage?  Because, like Zinfandel, the versatile Pinotage grape can be made into a variety of styles most of which are big and rich.  We've always felt the lighter styled Forrester Petit Pinotage was acceptably Pinot Noir-like.

Pinotage is a hybrid grape created in South Africa by crossing Pinot Noir with that industry's workhorse grape, Cinsault.  Cinsault, itself, is a lighter variety that makes a charming light red on its own.  With earthy red berry and plum flavors it wouldn't be mistaken for pinot but the Forrester Pinotage just might.

Pinotage is the second most widely planted grape in South Africa after Cinsault and like we said, it's usually made into a big rich, full-bodied red.  The tage part of Pinotage is an homage to Hermitage, an earlier South African name for Syrah which is what many think Pinotage tastes like.  So if the Forrester style really is pinot-like then it is definitely an outlier to the type.

When Good People Disagree

He is about thirty years younger than me, so a generation or so.  I came of age wine-wise close to fifty years ago.  Both of us are in the business so we both know our way around the wine tasting table but a week ago we disagreed profoundly on the wines we were tasting.  

This is a vendor I trust completely, by the way.  I let him write his own orders for me when he has a push on something he thinks would work here.  So I was very surprised by the conversation assessing the merits of the Chilean wines we were tasting.  I started by remarking that the wines were forward and aiming for the California palate.  He added commentary about their richness and compared them to the French model and here's where I think the chasm exists.

Most of the wines on American store shelves are different from those of a couple generations ago.  Not the great estate wines, but those from the worldwide mass marketers.  They know where their bread is buttered and they butter it well.

In the previous post (and probably several others before that) we talked about the many technological improvements in winemaking that have resulted in fresher, more quaffable wines.  Having gotten into wines when I did, I still remember the drier winier wines on the shelf that were consistent with historical European tastes.  I also remember the somewhat rough California field blend reds that had their own charm, albeit in their imperfection.  And then there were the extreme bad examples of the way things were fifty years ago including the somewhat oxidized or cork-tainted fare that was more common than we would like to admit.

So the paradigm shift that has happened in wine tastes means the younger taster only recognizes the cleaned-up model while the older guy remembers the way things used to be.  And that's alright.