Cape Blends delightful drinking but lack industry commitment |

Cape Blends make for delightful drinking but lack industry commitment

08/2019 Mike Froud Leave a comment

THERE ARE STILL a number of Cape Blend sceptics and naysayers. Apparently they don’t know what they’re missing, or don’t know better! Various expressions of Pinotage are enjoyed by wine connoisseurs around the world, and many of the cognoscenti are as enthusiastic about the red blends in which the SA-born variety plays a pivotal role – a minimum of 30% (and not more than 70%) is what the Pinotage Association prescribes to qualify as a Cape Blend. One of the 2019 Absa Perold Cape Blend Competition winners, Steytler Vision from Kaapzicht in the Bottelary ward of Stellenbosch, has a particularly impressive reputation. Abraham Perold Tributum from the KWV cellars in Paarl is the most successful wine in the history of the competition and a fine example of the category’s potential to benefit from bottle-ageing. Whereas Wildekrans of Bot River is the only farm to win in both the Perold Cape Blend and Absa Top 10 Pinotage competitions this year.

If the category has a shortcoming it’s perhaps that too few producers embrace ‘Cape Blend’ in their marketing. Only one of the Perold competition winners includes the term in the name of the wine and, if you look at the labels, none of South Africa’s Top 20 red blends overall are presented as Cape Blends, even though there’s a couple of them in the Classification. Who’d be willing to wager that the majority of wine lovers know what a Cape Blend is?! And why were there only 44 entries in the Pinotage Association’s Cape Blend competition, compared with the figure of 161 submissions received for their Absa Top 10 Pinotage competiton?! After all, great examples of Cape Blends have been around for 20 years or so.

The Perold panel of judges: convenor Wilhelm Pienaar (Hermanuspietersfontein), Janno Briers-Louw (Eenzaamheid), Samarie Smith (Benguela Cove), Nataleé Botha (Kleine Zalze) and Heinrich Kulsen (Nederburg). See below for their favourites. More info here.