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 :-)

The Tannat grape

During the winetasting at Magnus Wijnen in Kontich where I tried out all mono-cepage wines I could find -- in order to practice for my Tastevin exam next month -- my eye was caught by a wine from Cotes De Gascogne that features the Tannat grape.

Image by Agrofilms via Flickr

As it was the first time I heared this name my curiosity spiked. Later on I searched the web to find more and learned that this grape is currently considered the national grape of Urugay (I didn't even know they made wine) and its origin is in the Basque area in france where the Madiran area is the AOC that is known for this grape.

Wikipedia incomplete ...

When looking up some information about the Tannat grape that I tasted this afternoon I ended up surfing around on wikipedia and bumped into their list of wine producing regions. To my astonishment Belgium was not even mentioned ... 

I quickly added a the Hagelandse Wijn in a new section on Belgium. Hopefully someone will understand the hint and start filling in the rest. I would do it myself, but can currently not find the time to do so. Maybe one day ...

Wijnen Van Durme winetasting april 2009

This morning we went to Wijnen Van Durme in Merksem as we had gotten an invitation for a winetasting. To be honest we did not expect too much as this is quite an old fashioned shop that doesn't look very inviting and focusses mostly on French wines.

To our surprise we had however the most wonderful tasting of this weekend, tasting wonderful white wines (from an excellent Chardonnay-Viognier blend from Pays d'Oc to some wonderful, and very affordable Bourgognes).

After this excellent selection of white wines we started the reds with some not to great wines, but soon we ended up in really great Bordaux and Bourgogne wines. 

As usual the Bourgogne was expensive, but all in all still very affordable and much cheaper than expected.