Love it or hate it, Pinotage is the taste of South Africa. A wild and aggressively fruited cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsault, it can also make wines of incredible finesse and complexity with old Lanzerac vintages from the '60s being pure Burgundy. First bottled more than 50 years ago, it has been something of a local hero ever since.

That great social observer of Africa, Lawrence Green, advises: "Remember the name Pinotage if you want some of the best red wine the Cape can offer. Pinotage is a Cape product, designed as it were for the soil and climate." In 1961 the Lanzerac '59 won the Grand Championship Trophy at the Cape Young Wine Show and it's been popular with SA consumers ever since.

Pinotage is the calling card of a broader SA wine industry that anyone remotely interested in the fermented fruit of the vine should try at least once before they die. Tasting 115 Pinotages for the annual Absa Top Ten Pinotage Competition earlier this month revealed that there has never been a better time than now to drink the stuff.

International judge Guido Francque, who founded the Michelin two-star restaurant Hertog Jan in Bruges, was wildly enthusiastic about vintage 2009, which supplied most entries. "2009 will surely go into history as the vintage of breakthrough for Pinotage. It is proven now that Pinotage is one of the great classic varieties in the world and flagship of the South African wine industry."

On the final day's tasting judges faced 29 wines rated the best from the previous two days. The task was to choose a top 10 - a top 12 actually, as the wines were to be sent to a lab to test for bacterial faults and the possible presence of coffee beans. Of course, choosing a top 10 is not the same as ranking the wines from best to worst and then cutting and pasting a personal top 10 - the whole point is to showcase the diversity of styles available. After all, wasn't "variety is in our nature" the most sensible thing SA wine exporters ever said?

For how do you compare a soft Pinot Noir expression to a Bordeaux-style berry blaster? It depends on the dish, the desire and the wallet. This point was most eloquently made by Malcolm Gladwell in his book What the Dog Saw. Considering the ketchup conundrum - how come mustard is offered in dozens of varieties but tomato sauce has but a single style - he concludes that when it comes to food and drink, there are no universals. The Platonic ideal does not exist.

If there is no single Pepsi, how can there be a best Pinotage? There is not even an ideal spaghetti sauce - there are 36 varieties of Ragú in six classes: Old World, Chunky Garden, Robusto, Light, Cheese and Rich & Meaty.

"There is very nearly an optimal spaghetti sauce for every man, woman and child in America," Gladwell writes. Using the same reasoning, there are probably at least as many "best Pinotages" as there are consumers to buy them.