Ruarri asked me to write some pieces about Pinotage for this site, and I’m going to look at this variety by focusing on the winery that is most closely linked with Pinotage - Kanonkop Estate.

Part 1 - The Pinotage Buzz
by
Peter F May

Kanonkop Estate’s 2004 Pinotage is causing an online buzz. Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV opened a bottle in his vidcast (Episode 218) on South African wines. He was so impressed that he featured four bottles of it in the following episode to experience the differences that opening times and decanting made.

He first tasted the bottle he’d opened 24 hours earlier which he used in the previous vidcast. Then he compared two Kanonkop 2004’s that he had opened 5 hours previously; one had been decanted while the other had been left in the bottle. The fourth was opened on camera and tasted immediately.

Gary said “I like this wine, beautiful red cabbage profile, oil & vinegar & olives. Bananas are jumping, (I Iove bananas), structured like Bordeaux, terroir driven, this is essential class Pinotage. Comes from granite soil, you’re getting some of this. It’s really polished, but young, need another three years. Now getting dark liquorice flavour, gets olive & smoky on finish. I highly recommend it, I’m giving it 91 points. If you like extremely well polished and intriguing wines, seek this bottle out.”

The word ‘estate’ has a legal meaning in South Africa; it tells us this wine was made from grapes grown only in vineyards owned by and surrounding the winery. That it was made, matured and bottled in the winery.

Kanonkop is a well respected winery on the road to Paarl, just north of Stellenbosch. From the road its vineyards stretching back to a clump of trees in which is the winery. Behind and to the sides of the winery are low hills covered in vines. At the entrance is a cannon. For the name Kanonkop means Cannon Hill and refers to guns placed on hills in olden times that were fired when ships were seen along the coast to alert farmers to load up their wagons with produce to take to the harbour. Sailing ships travelling down around the southern tip of Africa would stop at the harbour to take on fresh meat, fruit, vegetables and water. And wine. The reason the Cape was settled in the mid 1600s was to provision ships and wine was first made there in 1659 because it was known that wine prevented scurvy among sailors.

Kanonkop Estate was established in 1910 and now is considered one of the ‘first growths’ of South Africa. It makes only red wines, and just four of them. A flagship Cabernet dominated Bordeaux blend named ‘Paul Sauer’ after the second owner, a 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, a 100% Pinotage and a second label named Kadette which is a varying blend of Pinotage, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Up till 1973 Kanonkop, as with most other vineyards, sold its grape to co-operatives. Since first making its own wines 35 years ago there have been only four winemakers, owner Jannie Krige, Jan “Boland” Coetzee (now owner of Vriesenhof Winery), Beyers Truter (now owner of Beyerskloof) and since 2002 Abrie Beeslaw.

Peter F May is the founder of The Pinotage Club - www.pinotage.org - an international cyber-based fan club for wines made from the Pinotage variety. Peter was awarded Honorary Membership of the producers Pinotage Association in 2004 and was a judge at the annual Pinotage Top 10 Competition in 2004 and 2005. Peter is a wine writer, educator and author. His book ‘Marilyn Merlot and the Naked Grape - odd wines from around the world‘ was published in summer 2006.

That was the first item in the Scavenger Hunt, here is the next –> Gary Can Wine Nerd It All Day If You Want

Have Fun!!

So after a year or so of being quiet, Cork’d and its overarching concept have been given much recognition in the past 2 weeks. Gary Vaynerchuck has gone from strength to strength over the past two years, and we can only wait in anticipation to see what he does with Cork’d. Already Cork’d has been tipped as one of the top 10 best designed sites in the world, and as Gary V. is undoubtedly heading toward being one of the most successful players in the industry, the two will surely make a happy union.

This year we’ve seen Wine X magazine fall by the wayside, and perhaps Cork’d'll now rise to fill the niche which Wine X was never quite able to: the community of young, experimental and down to earth wine consumers.

Grapethinking waits in anticipation for Wine 2.0 where much of the future will be delineated and many partnerships will be forged as a group of young world beaters step up to discuss how things are going to be once direct-shipping laws are loosened and distributors lose their stronghold.

Gary V. has begun to check the boxes needed to ensure his place in history by:

1. Establishing a reputable, nationwide, tech-driven, with-the-times medium to promote and sell high-class hand-selected wines to the American public at large.
2. Winning the hearts and minds of the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Eric Asimov, bloggers, Grape Radio and a wide spread of enthusiasts around the country who take his word as gospel.
3. Purchasing the first community for wine, with cutting edge Web 2.0 design and strong community features.

However, having been at the London Wine Fair for the past three days, with all the power and might of the internet, I couldn’t help but notice a gaping void. With the veritable firestorm in online media that has caught motor vehicle marketing, merchandising, PR and news media, even despite the efforts of Gary V., it would seem as if the producers themselves are trying to ignore the internet as a whole.

You just have to love what Stormhoek has to say about the wine and spirits fair, because it’s what I privately thought and never had the guts to say the whole time I was a sales manager, and despite the genius and insight driven Stormhoek marketing miracle who have the brilliant little tag on their site ‘Stormhoek: because the wine industry need a kick up the pants’, every other person at the fair had virtually no online strategy and seemed intent on spending their marketing budgets the same way everyone else does. One wonders why certain wineries even bother having marketing people, when it seems they all just end up doing things the way they were done before.

The place was littered with mass-produced brochures; wine makers flown out and housed at great expense (with giant carbon footprints) and expensive and flashy stands all trying to out do the next. There simply has to be a more cost effective, efficient and useful way to market wines than this, and there’s no doubt the ultimate solution will be the internet. It can’t be disputed, and any attempt to dispute it is denial. So how many more uber trade-fairs and brochures and necktags needs to be printed before people wake up to this fact? Stormhoek has done in two years what same major South African wineries have and perhaps never will be able to do, and on a fraction of the budget.

Gary V. has created the outlet and he has the community, and Stormhoek has proved the power of the internet through their own savvy. However, for those who may be stuck in the last decade, a huge space exists for a number of companies to come give them a helping hand into the future. If Michel Rolland is a millionaire for telling people time and again to micro-oxygenate, then there’s going to be a lot of money in going from vineyard to vineyard and letting people know that they may want to wake up to this little thing that’s called the internet.