Among the changes making today’s local wine industry unutterably different from what it was 30 years ago, the emergence of the “Bordeaux blend” is a significant development.
There are five important red-wine grapes associated with Bordeaux in southwest France, chief among them the noble cabernet sauvignon. Merlot and cabernet franc are also important, petit verdot and malbec less so — especially malbec, which is now the great grape of Argentina and not used here much.
The 30 years I’m celebrating are actually from a point somewhere between picking the grapes for the first local Bordeaux blend and marketing the finished wine nearly two years later.
The wine was Welgemeend 1979, made by the late Billy Hofmeyr. It was quickly followed by Meerlust Rubicon 1980, with Kanonkop Paul Sauer and Overgaauw Tria Corda close behind.
Now the number of such blends are legion, with many of them the flagships of their estates. Some are simply named for the property — Vergelegen, Morgenster among the grander examples — others have more arbitrary, occasionally whimsical, names, such as Buitenverwachting Christine, De Trafford Perspective, and a host are boringly but serviceably named for the grape varieties involved.
One or two of the fancier names of these blends even allude to the owner’s pride in using all five of the Bordeaux grapes, like De Toren’s Fusion V and Raka’s Quinary.
The pioneering Welgemeend also had a full house — or thought it did. A few decades later, when the (tiny) petit verdot component was discovered to be an uncertain variety, it was decided to call it “petit mystery”.
Sadly, Welgemeend has rather fallen by the wayside these days, with the winery in different hands and the mostly ageing vineyards ravaged by virus.
Apart from the rather abstract aim of offering homage to the example of Bordeaux, the point of blending different varieties is — with a bit of luck and skill — to create a whole that is greater than any of the individual parts and also greater than the mere sum of them. So, merlot might offer a bit of softness to pad the austerity of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc might add an intriguing fragrance and malbec a juicily fruity twist.
Most of the wines mentioned above are the pride of ambitious properties, some of them are excellent, and all are more or less expensive by local standards.
There are, however, a number of Cape Bordeaux blends selling for less than R100 a bottle, which offer fine quality and some interest.
I’m impressed, for example, by Ridgeback’s Journey, which is closer to R80, a wine in the spirit of traditional Bordeaux, with a graceful tannic firmness and a lovely light elegance — with 13% alcohol, which seems modest these days (that maiden Welgemeend was around 11,5%).
Journey has the added advantage of being closer to maturity than most available reds. The 2005 is still around and even the 2006 is starting to drink well.
Other good examples, scarcely more expensive, would include La Motte Millennium, Rupert and Rothschild Classique — a good stop-gap alternative to the more ambitious and maturation-deserving Baron Edmund — and Le Bonheur Prima.
Widely available and also good at the price is Nederburg’s Edelrood, which I remember as a smart wine for a student to aspire to in the latter 1970s, though it included alien varieties in those innocent days.