Some fairtrade red wines ...

After the quite succesfull white fairtrade wine I drank last weekend, I wanted to try the red Malbec from the same cooperation, la Riojana.

Unfortunately I must say that we did not even finish our glasses as both me and my wife did not like this wine. The taste was far too fruity and sweer (for our taste). In fact we both thought it was more like some kind of softdrink than wine. Probably some people will find this wine very nice, but it is not our taste.

Persistent as we were we tried a second bottle of red fairtrade wine. This time an organic Pinotage (2008), from Stellar Organics.
Although this wine was somewhat more to our liking, it did not taste like the other pinotage wines, like the excellent Raka Pinotage, that we are used to and that has a lot more body than this soft, almost dull, red wine

In order to have at least one wine that we liked this evening we settled for the much better Reserva Malbec from the bodega Trivento in Mendoza (Argentina). This wine has much more body, an explicit vanilla aroma, but still enough fruit to be more than simply another oaked merlot wine. It is only 1 Euro more expensive than the Pinotage above, but it is not fairtrade.

Black South African wines: M'Hudi

Do you recognize the feeling that something that you just learned about keeps coming back in various forms even though you did not notice anything of it before you initially heard about it ?

I've had this with M'hudi wines from South Africa. Not only did I see a BBC documentary about Wine: The Future that featured them (I watched this on the plane when flying to Singapore with KLM), but last week they were also linked (indirectly) from the Daily Sip newsletter.
(Other mentions of this documentary on a blog of the competition :-) )

In the documentary two South African winemakers were depicted, one white farmer that already had a big estate and was not trying to do some good by learning the black people of the town to appreciate wine. And the other farmer was a black professor that threw everything overboard to start the M'Hudi winery together with his family. His fist commercial success was by selling some Sauvignon Blanc wine to Marks and Spencer in the UK, and the documentary ended where the purchaser did agree to buy more of the same, but still didn't like the Pinotage blend of M'Hudi although the winemaker was most proud of that one. When I checked the website today they still don't sell the M'Hudi Pinotage either ...

Is Pinotage's popularity going down ?

According to some people in the wine course I am attending the usage of Pinotage is slowly but surely declining (due to the sometimes harsh taste ...). This seems like a pity to me as have already tasted a few excellent South African Pinotage based wines in the last couple of months.

If anyone has information about the evolution of Pinotage growing I would be interested in receiving your comments.

I have a few bottles of the Raka Pinotage wine in my cellar and I really like the spicy taste of it, other excellent Pinotage wine is the Allee Bleue Pinotage that I tasted last weekend (but didn't buy as the cellar is overflowing ...).
We also tasted an excellent set of Pinotage wines when our colleague from South Africa visited our company wine club last year.

On wikipedia I learned that Pinotage is now also being grown outside South Africa, but unfortunately I haven't found any to taste and compare yet. Looking further on the web for more information I quickly bumped into an article at The Pinotage Club posted a few weeks ago that indicates that the first commercial Pinotage wine was only made in 1959, this seems very recent considering that the grape was already crafted 30 years before that, but this story is confirmed in multiple other sources thus I guess it is true :-)