From £12
I don’t know about you but the wines I value above all others are those that could only be made in the place responsible for them. This is one of those wines, a so-called Cape blend, a delightful white based on South Africa’s most-planted grape variety Chenin Blanc, but with all sorts of additional positive ingredients.
When I first tasted this wine I thought it might have been created as a sort of rubbish bin for offcuts from other wines, but it really works. The recipe is 46% Chenin Blanc, 23% Sauvignon Blanc, 19% Verdelho, 8% Viognier and 4% Semillon and the wine presumably owes its honeyed aroma to the Chenin, but there’s also a lovely spine of freshness – perhaps thanks to the Sauvignon Blanc and its cousin Semillon, and then there’s a real burnished tanginess that I associate with Verdelho. I’m not sure I can pick out the small portion of Viognier – maybe its mayblossom aroma has been overwhelmed by the honey, straw and apples of Chenin. But there’s a very appetising saltiness on the finish of this wine that is quite powerful enough (14% alcohol but still zesty and not heavy) to drink with food. When I tasted it I immediately thought of shellfish of the juicy pale pink sort – a Thai prawn salad or garlicky prawns perhaps – and in fact enjoyed it last night with a Thai takeaway. Serve it pretty cool.
The grapes were grown on the famous Melck family's Muratie farm on Simonsberg (illustrated above). This particular vintage was made by consultant winemaker Francois Haasbroek very much in the mould of their lightly oaked white blend named for one of the estate's early owners Laurens Campher. It is one of many impressive wines in The Liberator series of South African wines sought out by my fellow Master of Wine Richard Kelley who now runs importer Dreyfus Ashby in the UK. For this reason, I’m afraid it is available only in the UK – my apologies to lovers of wine bargains everywhere else.
Kelley styles himself Rick the Cape Crusader in his role as ‘liberator of rare parcels of wines; maybe they come from an occasional experimental batch or possibly an interesting off-cut from some proud winemaker’s latest premium release’. And he sells his wines with whimsy, giving them all intriguing names and a back story illustrated in cartoon form. The quirky names and cartoons are very much a joint effort with Fanakalo, the go-to label designers for South Africa's new wave wine producers (see South Africa – the new wave London tasting from last year).
Other wines in the series have names such as The Francophile (Syrah and Chenin Blanc), Old Breton (Franschhoek Cabernet Franc – Kelley’s other great love is the Loire) and even a Bordeaux blend called cheekily An Arrogance of Sommeliers (not the lovely Zomms about which Erica Platter wrote recently, surely?).
The full name of this Episode Six bottling is Dr Melck and The Spiders from SARS, a name inspired by David Bowie’s seminal 1972 album whose full name was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars. Rijk Melck was Rick’s doctor when he lived in South Africa (Rijk subsequently took over the family farm) and the cartoons that illustrate this wine’s story tell us all about The Liberator’s problems with snoring, his search for medical help, and the famously cobwebby cellars of the Melck estate Muratie.
SARS is an acronym for the South African tax authorities that Melck had to satisfy in a hurry by selling off this lot of wine. All this background is surely much more fun than the usual blah blah of ‘carefully tended vines picked at optimal ripeness.'
The blend was slightly tweaked and bottled by the talented Carl van der Merwe at DeMorgenzon but the main thing is that this a serious dry white wine that would sell for a lot more than £12-13 a bottle if it came from any other country. South Africa continues to be the source of some of the finest wine value in the world – especially white wine value.
The Find this wine link currently highlights six British stockists, including Oddbins who charge £12.95 for it. But I’m assured that the wine can also be found at Wine Reserve in Cobham and the Wright Wine Company in Skipton.