Sunday turned out to be rather hotter than is ideal for drinking reds, but that's my tasting day and I was determined to figure out what makes a Cape blend a Cape Blend.
The Wine of South Africa website lists 21 red grape varietals which are popularly grown here. Most of us know about the most common ones, such as merlot, Shiraz, pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon.
Often these become single-varietal wines. The others are cooked together in cellars.
The question is, why blend? And why do we need a Cape Blend?
First, some grapes complement each other well and taste better together than on their own. In some climates blending is an insurance against bad crops. The Bordeaux blend, a blend of five grapes ripening at different times, is insurance against natural disasters. If one variety is destroyed , there are four left.
A Cape Blend is any red wine blended with a significant amount of pinotage.
The other reason is that we need to find a way to use and to hide pinotage.
Pinotage, a uniquely South African grape, is a cross between the tricky pinot noir and the easy-growing cinsaut. But a group of British Masters of Wine once said it smelled "hot and horrible" and tasted like "rusty nails".
Of the many bottles I opened on Sunday, the Douglas Green St Augustine 2011 Cape Blend was the only one marked as such. It was perfectly good, but the surprise of my day came from the bottle of Tassenberg I bought.
Not a Cape blend, but blended in the Cape, it was perfectly drinkable and nothing to be embarrassed about.
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