South Africa

It hasn't all been smooth sailing but South Africa seems to have finally arrived.  The turning point in their journey was in the early 1990's when apartheid ended and the government got out of the wine industry.  Up to that point the government-sponsored KWV cooperative had run things and they did a good job.  They actually built the South African wine industry, albeit with brandy as the base product.  Ten years after the big change, the sales percentages would be reversed with dinner wines becoming the order of the day.

The South African Wine law was enacted in 1973 but revised in the early nineties to allow for an expanding wine industry.  At the same time the newer technologies that were dominating the industry elsewhere were brought to South Africa along with some of the world's best winemakers as the country prepared for a boon.  But it didn't happen right away.  South Africa has always been isolated from the well known wine markets and each of those markets had the homecooking of its own wine industry to compete with.

There is an unfortunate sacrifice inherent in trying to satisfy an international market.  You have to make what people from other cultures want.  The most popular South African red and white wine grapes of the twentieth century were Cinsault and Chenin Blanc.  They grew well so they were popular with industry insiders but more importantly, the critics acclaimed their quality.  Cinsault, a Cotes du Rhone blender, largely went into brandy so it had to be sacrificed.  Chenin Blanc, while still the most widely planted grape in the country, is but a fraction of the juggernaut it once was.

Also sacrificed was Pinotage, the signature red wine grape of the country.  It proved to be too hard of a sell to the western world.  The Pinotage that has survived in more recent shipments here is a superior pinot-ish red dinner wine that is much more to our tastes than earlier efforts.  

The industry expansion that was begun in the 1990's includes new wine appellations to the east of the historic center in the Western Cape.  Those newer vineyards have a long way to go before they can compete in quality with the Cape.  The learning curve can be lengthy.  In the meantime Western Cape reds and whites are finally selling like they should.  Our Klein Constantia (est.1685!) Sauvignon Blanc and red blend sell quite well here and by the way, South African Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc are acclaimed by many of us to be second only to France in quality.

Matthews - In Pursuit of Pure Washington Wine

While that mission statement sounds a little grandiose, when you consider the quality displayed across everything they make, the claim seems reasonable.  For instance, they have what many of us think is the best Sauvignon Blanc on the continent and a red Bordeaux blend that rivals any from Napa.  Maybe they aren't just in pursuit of purity; maybe they've arrived.

Matthews was established in 1993 but re-born when the Otis family took over in 2004. They make one white wine, the Sauvignon Blanc, and just a few reds using Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.  Matthews' Columbia Valley vineyards are located in the Royal Slope, Red Mountain and Horse Heaven Hills AVA's at the same latitude as Bordeaux and Burgundy in France.  That latitude offers the long sunny days and cool nights that ripen wine grapes ever so optimally.

In 2021 Matthews was re-born again with a new winemaking crew.  From the winery website blog, the three gentlemen now in charge "completely overhauled the existing winemaking techniques and processes."  They sourced grapes from new places and planted new clones "for complexity and dimension at blending."  To concentrate and intensify their product they reduced yields by 30%; harvested later for riper fruit and dramatically extended grape maceration for richness and depth. 

Maybe they're now in pursuit of perfection.

Sancerre

If it's light dry white wine and it sells in January, it must be good and Sancerre has its own punched ticket as the best there is in Sauvignon Blanc.  With its light bone dry, clean fruit flavors and distinct minerality, Sancerre's historic reputation is secure.  Nowhere else in the world comes close to what Sancerre does...unless you look next door at Pouilly Fume.

So what makes the stuff so good?  It's got to be the soils.  As we've reported in the past, this part of northern France was under water for most of the life of the planet resulting in Kimmeridgian marlstone soils for the most part.  This is a limestone/clay soil type that influences the full bodied perfumed roundedness of Sancerre fruit.  Silex (flint) is a secondary soil of the region that provides the Sauvignon Blanc grapes with their steely minerality.  

As we said above, nowhere else does Sauvignon Blanc approach the quality of Sancerre.  Everywhere else the grape shows an herbaceous grassiness to one degree or another and that is fine in itself.  We don't believe the spectrum of flavors a wine can exhibit should be segmented judgmentally into positive and negative categories.  Without sounding too contradictory, however, we do believe in the historic model for each and that's where Sancerre wins out.   

What was to become the Sancerre wine appellation was first planted by the Romans in the first century.  It became a legally defined Sauvignon Blanc wine appellation in the inaugural class in 1936 and has been expanded four times since then.  We mentioned the Pouilly Fume AOC earlier.  Sancerre is sandwiched between Menatou-Salon on the left and Pouilly Fume on the right and for most of us, examples from each appellation would be indistinguishable.  They're all great!

Rosenblum Cellars Chenin Blanc/Viognier

In theory each bottle in a wine tasting lineup should be better than the one before.  In theory.  So when our vendor went through the lineup starting with three somewhat similar white blends followed by three reds, we were struck by how good that very first wine was.  By the way, in most wine tastings the price of the wines usually ascends so if that first inexpensive bottle is memorable, to our way of thinking, it is a find indeed.

Rosenblum Cellars was established in 1978 in Alameda, California maybe five miles from where we were living at the time.  Had we known we would be writing this now we could've been doing our spade work back then but it took us a few years to find our career path.  When we did land in the wine industry permanently, Rosenblum was still there.

Actually Kent Rosenblum hit the ground running when he started his operation.  Zinfandel was his thing back then and finding superior fruit in vineyards untapped by the larger industry players was his forte.  Rasmussen befriended these growers, struck a deal with each and then bottled single vineyard Zinfandels with the individual vineyard owner's name on each label.  At the time Rasmussen was crowned "The King of Zins."

Charlie Tsegeletos is the current Rosenblum winemaker and he was nice enough to educate me on the Chenin/Viognier.  The blend is 85% Chenin and 15% Viognier and the fruit is sourced from two estate vineyards in the greater Lodi region.  The wine shows bright citrus, pineapple and honey flavors with the Chenin being responsible for most of the light crispness and fresh fruit flavors.  The Viognier lends body and apricot flavor to the blend.  The wine is cold fermented in stainless steel and sees no oak or malolactic fermentation.

Gehricke/Sebastiani and the Knight's Valley AVA

Gehricke is a very successful line of five varietal wines made by 3 Badge Beverage of Sonoma.  We have at least a five year history of selling them here at the store.  Sebastiani, established in 1904 and also Sonoma-based, was one of the most successful wine companies of the twentieth century.  Unfortunately they went under in the early 1990's.  We knew the two operations were related somehow but just how that happened always eluded us.  It's complicated.  Stop in the store if you want to know more.  Suffice it to say Gehricke is sort of a decendant of Sebastiani.

The current best seller from Gehricke is the Knight's Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.  It shows full bodied rich red fruit flavors, soft tannins, prominent oak with vanilla and clove spice.  While Knight's Valley is most definitely a part of Sonoma, in many respects it is more like Napa.  The Knight's Valley AVA (American Viticultural Area) abuts the Alexander Valley AVA with the Chalk Hill AVA lying just south of it.  It is the furthest east of Sonoma's wine country where it's southern end meets Napa's northwest corner.

The Knight's Valley AVA is one of the five original 1983 Sonoma AVAs.  It contains 37,000 acres where thirty growers maintain 2,000 vineyard acres.  Three of those thirty are huge.  Beringer and Kendall-Jackson both market their own Knight's Valley Cabernets while Bavarian Lion Vineyards (est. 1996) has five hundred acres in vines.  It is from the less well-known Bavarian Lion Vineyards that we assume Gehricke sources their fruit.

Alsatian Whites

We've made no secret about our tastes in white wines.  We like 'em light, dry and minerally.  If it's summertime and seafood or salads are in the offing, Sauvignon Blanc is our go-to.  If we just want to taste a generally great example of a white wine other than Sauv Banc, we go to Alsace where we have yet to taste one that fails to impress.

There are ten white grape types allowed in Alsace.  For our purposes here we'll concern ourselves with the five biggies: Gewurztraminer, Riesling, Pinot Gris, Muscat and Auxxerrois.  The first four are considered to be noble types by the locals.  The Muscat name in Alsace is a little different in that it encompasses four different Muscat types.  Auxxerois is genetically the same as Chardonnay and produces a white wine in that vein.  While Muscat and Pinot Gris don't conjure up notions of nobility for us we'll defer to the Alsatians and their classification.  We feel, however,  Alsatian Riesling and Gewurz are bonafide stars within any white wine lineup.

Ninety percent of the wines of Alsace are white with about 60% of those being AOC varietals made from the noble types listed above.  Another four percent are varietals sourced from recognized Grand Cru vineyards.  Another fifteen percent are Cremant sparkling wines.  The rest are either blends of the notable grapes and/or lesser grapes and since the AOC (noble) types are the only types rated, all of these others are considered to be mere table wine.  Since Alsace makes 100% varietal wines, some of the table wine blends consist of the great types while others are of the lesser five types.  In general a Gentil is usually a blend of superior grapes; Edelzwickers are usually lower quality blends.

Alsace has an identity problem, by the way.  For much or its history it has been German including four stints in the last hundred fifty years.  While most French wine labels identify by place names, Alsace, like Germany, labels with varietal names.  In fact, Riesling and Gewurztraminer are German grape types and therein lies the problem.  The public sees the wines as German and generalizes about style and quality based on what they have tasted in the past.  Sweeter mass marketed German plonk doesn't begin to represent the nobility of dry Alsatian Riesling and Gewurztraminer.  Germany has now learned this from Alsace and is currently making drier wines.    

Malbec

Okay, so we've tackled this subject several times in the past.  Hang with me.  We've found a new angle on this one.

Black Cabra is one of the real bargains in Argentine Malbec at a mere $12.99/btl.  We thought we would post about it here only to find importer Vino del Sol really has nothing in the way of relevant information about the product.  Moreover, depending on the vintage, the  "estate bottling" on the label may refer to different estates in Argentina.  So while Black Cabra isn't winery-specific, to our way of thinking, we're fine with it as long as Vino del Sol maintains the quality it has.

So we pivoted to a quick study of the Malbec grape and learned a few things.  While the experts believe Malbec originated in Burgundy, Cahor in southwestern France is the current home for Malbec today.  Now popularly called Cot, in the Cahor AOC the grape produces an inky tannic dark purple version that contrasts with the more popular style from Argentina.  

Why is that?  It has to do with Malbec's vineyard problems in France where diseases like coulure, downy mildew and rot from frost inordinately affect the vines.  It has become so problematic that Bordeaux has largely replaced Malbec plantings with Merlot and Cabernet Franc.

So once again, why is Argentine Malbec so different from the French version?  It's because the Malbec vines in Argentina which date back to 1868 are not the same as what is currently in France.  Over time that clone of Malbec was in all likelihood ravaged by disease into extinction.