‘Wine is music in the form of water”, American writer and wine-importer Terry Theise enthused, reminding me somehow of the suggestion by Victorian aesthete Walter Pater that ‘all art aspires to the condition of music”. Let me muddle them, add local colour and banality, and venture that all South African wine producers aspire to the condition of Kanonkop.
No estate is quite like it. There’s no grand manor house and the name is a mere 80 years old (and used on wine labels only since 1973), yet Kanonkop has the aura of long-established prestige. Of the country’s top producers it shows the most continuity in terms of style and range with the past — the Paul Sauer blend goes back to 1981, Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinotage to the 1970s.
Those three would be at or near the head of most informed listings and, unusually for flagship wines, they are not special cellar darlings but made in substantial quantities. The fact that they sell extremely well and for serious prices makes Kanonkop, at a time when many glittering producers are having a rough time, more enviable still.
Kanonkop remains a family farm — a smart one, certainly, with a handsome but welcoming public tasting room. When they have functions (as recently, to launch the Black Label Pinotage 2008), media and trade are greatly outnumbered by friends and customers. Wine flows unstintingly, with old vintages to sample too. Paul Krige — he and his equally benign brother Johann own Kanonkop — puts his zillionth snoek on the coals (thankfully, there’s never any variation in the menu) and Mrs Krige helps to pile your plate.
If guests come for the braai as much as the wine, the Kriges seem to do these things for the pleasure of entertaining as much as for marketing. It is a friendly, unpretentious place, as well as supremely professional — a uniquely undisputed Cape ‘first growth”.
Fine track record
Black Label Pinotage was one of two new wines quite recently introduced, the first for decades. About 1 000 bottles, made from the farm’s oldest vines, are sold each year through a few outside brokers for about R1 000 a bottle (the Kriges are trying to kick-start a serious secondary market for local wine). Unlike some other startlingly priced wannabes, this wine had a fine track record, for no estate has done more to give the pinotage grape a good name than Kanonkop.
The latest release, 2008, is excellent, the finest so far. It combines the relative austerity of the 2006 with the best aspects of the jammier, sweeter 2007, to give a lovely, elegant wine that alludes happily to the noble pinot noir antecedents of pinotage. For the price, you could buy a few cases of the other Kanonkop newbie, Kadette Rosé, also from pinotage, and you wouldn’t do badly. Gratifyingly less pink (salmon or onion-skin, rather) than many, it is soft and easy, lightly rich and bone dry, with restrained raspberry fruit-pastille notes and a gentle earthy grip. That’s R52.
At R65 ex-farm (better value, actually) is the long-established Kanonkop Kadette Dry Red, which adds the Bordeaux grape varieties of Paul Sauer to a pinotage base. There’s no dumbing down — just a friendlier, earlier-ready version of the estate’s top wines: spicy, fruit-filled, firmly built and immensely drinkable, beautifully made by cellarmaster Abrie Beeslaar. At all levels, there’s no safer Stellenbosch name to boast on your dinner table than Kanonkop.