On 17 November 1924, Professor Abraham Izak Perold jotted in his diary the happenings of the day, one of which was some gardening. A seemingly inconsequential, green-fingered moment, that would set 100 years of viticulture in motion, and launch South Africa’s indigenous variety, Pinotage to the world.
On a sunny day in his garden at Welgevallen Experimental Farm, Stellenbosch University’s first professor of viticulture employed the technique of ‘open-air hybridisation’ aka simply smudging a male Hermitage (otherwise known as Cinsault) flower with pollen from Pinot Noir. The experiment created four seeds, which he planted in the same garden, a year later in 1925.
There, amidst the overgrown foliage, four young Pinotage plants grew. Perold was said to have forgotten all about his experiment when he left the university in 1927 for a position at what was then South Africa’s premier wine company, KWV.
We have Charlie Niehaus to thank for remembering the existence of the nascent plants – a lecturer who had an inkling of what the professor was up to. Digging them up carefully, he transported them to CJ Theron’s nursery at Elsenburg Agricultural Training Institute. There it was labelled ‘Perold’s Hermitage x Pinot Noir’. With the full, enthusiastic support of Perold, Niehaus then grafted plant material onto rootstocks at Welgevallen. And it was in that very vineyard that the name ‘Pinotage’ was decided upon by the two protagonists – a contraction of the grapes that sired it. The best four plants of these were selected from which Pinotage's inaugural mother block was planted at Myrtle Grove in 1943, a farm on Sir Lowry’s Pass near Stellenbosch and Somerset West.
However, from this promising start it took a bit longer for it to finally land in the bottle (as a single varietal in any case). The first time ‘Pinotage’ was officially emblazoned on a label was the 1959 Lanzerac, released in 1961, from a vineyard planted in 1953 on Bellevue estate, a block which is still in use today.
The contemporary renaissance of Pinotage
“Pinotage is capable of many diverse expressions,” says its longtime champion, winemaker Beyers Truter. “It also has a remarkable ability to age.” In fact, it’s this ageability that has seen it gain traction on the secondary market, more so than any other South African red wine, fast becoming a collector’s favourite.
At just 25, Truter became Kanonkop’s third winemaker, a tenure that stretched from 1981 to 2003, during which he also started his own estate, Pinotage-focused Beyerskloof in the Bottelary area of Stellenbosch. The first vines for Beyerskloof were planted in 1988.
In his time at Kanonkop, Beyers Truter radically changed the way Pinotage was treated in both the vineyard and the cellar. His moment of discovery came after tasting a 1972 Simonsig Pinotage, which was then aged ten years in bottle. Inspired, he adopted Frans Malan’s method of ageing Pinotage in new oak for 12 months.
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