Bottles of Kanonkop Black Label Pinotage from different vintages.
Pinotage is a grape variety that has struggled to be taken seriously. It has wrestled with a reputation of making wines with a certain flavour – one that not everyone finds agreeable. Bad Pinotage often has a distinctive sweet and sour character, often with some bitterness.
Of late, though, its reputation has improved quite a bit, and a lot of the thanks have to go to one producer: Kanonkop.
They’ve taken it seriously for decades, and the Kanonkop Pinotage is a banker for cellaring. Their previous winemaker, Beyers Truter, became known as Mr Pinotage. Current winemaker Abrie Beeslaar came to Kanonkop as an understudy to Truter in 2002, and took over in 2003 – and he’s kept this focus. A big step was when he began making an ‘icon’ level Pinotage, the Black Label, in 2006.
Abrie is keen to change people’s minds about Pinotage as a variety. It’s a relatively recent one, as grape varieties go. In 1924. Professor Itzak Perold took pollen from Pinot Noir and flowers of Cinsault and made a cross. In 1925 the first seeds taken from this crossing.
But this new variety almost didn’t make it. For some unknown reason Perold planted the seeds in his residence garden at the University in 1925. Two years later he left to work with the KWV, leaving the vines growing in his now untended garden. This new crossing was saved by a young lecturer Dr Charlie Niehaus when Perold’s garden was cleared up, and the four plants were replanted in the nursery at Elsenburg Agricultural College by Prof CJ Theron, who later showed the vines, which he had grafted, to Perold. This was when the name Pinotage was coined, and gradually people began to plant it and make wines from it.
The first experimental varietal wines were made in 1941, and the 1953 first commercial plantings went into the ground at Kanonkop, and these vines are the ones that the Black Label is made from. 1959 the first commercial Pinotage was bottled under the Lanzerac label.
The Black Label block (1953 plantings) at Kanonkop, taken just after harvest a few years ago.
But it would be wrong to think that a cross like this shares the characteristics of the two parents, in some way blending them together. That’s an attractive idea, but it’s not how grapevine genetics work. Grapevines don’t breed true because they have a high level of what’s called heterozygosity. [Putting this simply, it means that at each position where there is a gene (they come in pairs), they are often different.] So if you mate Pinot Noir with Pinot Noir and plant the seeds, each seed would give you a new variety, not Pinot Noir. They’d vary widely in their properties. And think of many of the famous varieties: they don’t resemble their parents. Cabernet Sauvignon is a cross of Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc, for example. And Pinot Noir crossed with Gouais Blanc (a white variety) has produced among others Chardonnay, Aligoté, Melon and Gamay. So it’s best just to think of Pinotage as its own variety rather than dwell too much on its parentage.
So, the Kanonkop Black label Pinotage. On 10 May 2022 Johann Krige (proprietor) was in town with Abrie Beeslaar to take us through a vertical of Black Label Pinotage. This is the first time an event like this had been held, so we were all quite excited to see how these wines were showing.
‘As you can hear,’ began Abrie, ‘we haven’t been speaking English for two years now.’ He explained that the Black Label Pinotage was a wine that asked to be made. ‘This wine is unique and different: it wasn’t necessarily better than the Pinotage we were making, but it had an identity. I wanted to show people what old vine Pinotage tasted like.’
‘This wine developed from the soil upwards,’ he says. ‘It was something the vineyard showed me. This in my view is how wine should develop, not from the boardroom down.’
Kanonkop has a reputation for being unpretentious, and this shows in the winery. ‘Our cellar isn’t polished,’ says Abrie. ‘it’s not like Bordeaux.’
What’s changed since 2006 since this wine was made? In 2016 they brought in optical sorting for all their grapes, and this discards up to 1.5% of the grapes that come in. ‘It’s not much but when you see what you are losing it’s significant,’ he says.
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