Pinotage

Pinotage was created in 1925 by Abraham Izak Perold, the first professor of viticulture at Stellenbosch University, who crossed Pinot Noir with Cinsault — known locally as Hermitage, which gives the portmanteau name. He was trying to combine Pinot Noir's quality with Cinsault's reliability in a hot climate.

The four seedlings he planted were nearly lost: Perold left the university and the plants were almost cleared away before a colleague rescued them. The first commercial wine appeared in the 1940s.

It is South Africa's signature variety and a divisive one. The grape ferments fast and hot, and careless handling produces volatile compounds giving a burnt-rubber or acetone character that gave Pinotage a poor international reputation for decades. That problem is well understood now and largely solved by temperature control and gentler extraction.

Made well it gives a deeply coloured wine with black plum, blackberry, red cherry and a distinctive smoky, savoury note often described as coffee or dark chocolate. Tannins are firm, acidity is moderate, and the best examples from old bush vines in Stellenbosch and the Swartland age for a decade or more.

A deliberately coffee-forward style, made with heavily toasted oak staves, has been commercially successful and is regarded by most serious producers as a distraction.

It also appears in the Cape Blend, a South African category combining Pinotage with Bordeaux varieties.

Its reputation problem is worth stating precisely, because it is fixable and largely fixed. The burnt-rubber and acetone characters that damaged the grape internationally were the result of fast, hot fermentations producing volatile compounds, and they are controlled by temperature management and gentler extraction. Wines made in the last fifteen years rarely show it.

What remains is a genuinely distinctive variety. Good Pinotage has a smoky, savoury quality that is unlike anything in its parentage, and the old bush-vine plantings in Stellenbosch and the Swartland produce wines with real depth and a decade of ageing potential.

South Africa's relationship with the grape is complicated: it is the country's unique contribution to viticulture and also the variety most likely to be dismissed abroad, which has led some producers to abandon it and others to defend it with considerable energy. It remains the most interesting argument in Cape wine.