Pinotage

The name of this South African grape, Pinotage, tends to sound a lot like the world famous Pinot Noir. Due to this similarity, it’s easy to assume that they taste similar as well. Well, that’s not true. If you were to compare the South African Pinotage to another wine, the grape looks and tastes much more like Shiraz. Anyways, why haven’t we heard much about this rich dark coloured grape? Similar to other high yield grapes, it’s struggled with bad reputation for some time, but things are changing for the better.

Pinotage was first crossed in 1925 of South Africa, a grape crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut by Abraham Perold, a local scientist. He noticed that Pinot Noir didn’t do very well in the South Africa’s climate, so he crossed them with Cinsaut, a very productive species with high yield. Clearly, the goal was to create something that tastes like Pinot Noir but grew as easy as Cinsaut.

The result of the crossing was rather unexpected. Pinotage grapes ended up being extremely dark in colour, creating bold and high in tannin wine. Despite the flavour difference, Pinotage soon became the second most planted grape in the country of South Africa. However, due to the grape's high yields, some winemakers started producing low quality commercial wine, by stretching it as thin as they could. As a result, a lot of consumers were very unhappy with the product quality. Luckily, a handful of producers banded together to reduce the crop yields and focus on getting the most out of this unique grape.

Pinotage is incredibly dense in colour and bold in flavour, with slight notes of blackberry, tar, plum sauce and tobacco. Once in a while, you’ll even notice red fruit flavours of red licorice, raspberry and even red bell pepper. While fruit flavours are great, some bottles of South Africa’s wine often surprise consumers with flavours of dried leaves, rooibos, bacon, sour sauce and sweet pipe tobacco.

The grape is usually high in PH, which means low acidity. Most producers will acidify the wines in the fermentation process. In fact, many winemakers in the hot climates of Australia, Argentina, California, Chile and other countries acidify their wines. If well-integrated, acidification is pretty much unnoticeable. Expect tannins to be bold, but with a sweet finish.

If you’d like to try the wine, buy Pinotage at the ZYN retail liquor store in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, or shop online at ZYN.ca!