Vineyards in South Africa’s Stellenbosch wine region.MIKE HUTCHINGS/Reuters
The Grape Glossary: A guide to hip varietals
It's the grape that divides people like Donald Trump. Assertive, offbeat and sometimes wildly awkward, pinotage is the quintessential love-it-or-hate-it variety, an argument in a bottle. On the plus side, it fills the palate with chewy, jammy fruit and often a heady aromatic quality that can suggest smoky bacon. More controversially, that smoky note can veer into synthetic terrain, calling to mind varnish, nail-polish remover or fumes redolent of hot rubber, as in a scorched radiator hose. Thirsty yet?
A signature of South Africa, pinotage was bred in 1925 by Abraham Izak Perold, a viticulture professor at Stellenbosch University. Perold had been toying with a way to capture the essence of fragrant, velvety pinot noir in a grape that would be easier to grow than that finicky red of Burgundy. He found his answer by pollinating pinot with sturdy, rustic cinsault, a variety associated with France's Rhône Valley that South Africans used to call Hermitage.
Perold died in 1941 and would not live to see the success of his new spawn, which took time to propagate and catch on, hitting its commercial stride only in the 1960s. Even as plantings boomed, all was not perfect in the land of pinotage. The vine was plagued by a susceptibility to viral disease, which did no favours to its flavour. And producers, lacking an established playbook for vinifying the novel variety, struggled to tame the beast – with mixed results. Eventually, better vineyard management and more careful handling at cooler fermentation temperatures improved pinotage's fate. By the 1990s, things were finally looking up for Perold's baby, thanks largely to the research efforts of winemakers who banded together to form the Pinotage Association.
In some ways I think of the variety in the same vein as California zinfandel: big, bold and gutsy, more like a Ford F1 pickup truck than a pretentious luxury sedan. Like red zinfandel, it's just the thing for hearty meat stews, barbecued ribs, grilled lamb or game meats, even a spicy bowl of chili. Top pinotage producers include Beyerskloof, Delheim, Kanonkop, Kaapzicht and L'Avenir.
Experimentation has also yielded a distinctive and perhaps even more controversial subcategory that's been dubbed "coffee pinotage." Pioneered by winemaker Bertus Fourie, the style is achieved in part by fermenting the juice with a special strain of yeast and subjecting it to contact with heavily charred oak staves. The technique tends to erase pinotage's synthetic notes while imparting uncanny essences of espresso and chocolate. A runaway success with new and especially younger wine drinkers, these generally moderately priced brands go by such names as Barista, Café Culture, The Bean, The Grinder and, more bluntly, Coffee Pinotage.
Where there's pinotage, arguments about taste are sure to follow.
The Flavour Principle by Lucy Waverman and Beppi Crosariol (HarperCollins) won top prize for best general English cookbook at the 2014 Taste Canada Food Writing Awards.
E-mail your wine and spirits questions to Beppi Crosariol. Look for answers to select questions to appear in the Wine & Spirits newsletter and on The Globe and Mail website.