To bring warmth to your wintry blood and fire to your frosty belly, you can’t do better than gorgeous, but sadly unfashionable, fortified wine. I’m addicted, myself.
The most common fortified styles in South Africa are jerepigo (or muscadel) and port (Europe doesn’t like us calling it that, so it’s usually Cape Vintage, Cape Tawny and so on).
Jerepigo isn’t really wine, in fact, but unfermented grape juice whacked into submission with spirits (fortified to around 16%). That’s why it so often has lovely grapey flavours and is also sweeter than port. It’s traditional hot-country stuff, so in bleak midwinter it happily recalls the excesses of a Klein Karoo summer.
Many former co-ops are among the producers still offering jerepigos and muscadels. The latter are basically a subset of the former but made only from the aromatic muscadel grape. KWV and Monis sometimes release decades-old bottlings, which are fine, sumptuous and immensely easy to love, yet sit on bottlestore shelves for ages at ridiculously low prices.
Standard jerepigos and muscadels are even cheaper: most are at least pleasurable but, for about R35, for example, you can get the delicious, long-lived Red Muscadel from Nuy, invariably one of the best.
Like jerepigos, ports are made by adding spirits, but the juice thus strengthened has already partly fermented. That is, about half of the sugar in the grape has been converted to alcohol. At which point the winemaker knocks the industrious yeast cells on the head with spirits, they turn up their tiny yeasty toes in shocked disbelief and fermentation ceases. The serious, classic ports are less sweet and sugary than jerepigos — more refined, though not necessarily better (whatever that means) and somewhat more alcoholic.
Generally brandy is used to fortify port, but if you have a modish taste for grappa, Solms-Delta can oblige. The Franschhoek winery has just brought out a fortified shiraz called Gemoedsrus (“Peace of mind”) made with grappa. It is a delicious and interesting alternative to standard ports (R188 a bottle).
More conventional in its fortificatory methods, though not in excellence and style, is Niepoort-Sadie Cape Fortified 2008. This is a one-off joint effort between Eben Sadie, king of the Swartland, and Dirk Niepoort, the equally brilliant man who heads the great Niepoort winery in Portugal. Definitely one for the richer hedonist, at R375 a bottle (halves also available).
What can I say of it? It has an easy charm which might make you suspicious as you gulp it down all too easily: Where’s young port’s fiery tannin, power and acidity? But concentrate a little and everything is there. This is the first young port I’ve had that’s so delicate I’m sure it wants to be a riesling when it grows up.