From 185 rand, €23.40, £24, $40.99
This South African blend is a truly fine wine by any standard and, like so many South African wines, is underpriced in view of the quality. I could have chosen many more examples from my collection of exceptional wines in South African excitement – the rest but have chosen this particular wine because it is more widely distributed – in the UK, US, Luxembourg, Estonia and, of course, South Africa.
UK importer is Indigo Wine and stockists include Bottle Apostle, Connolly’s, Handford, Hedonism and Swig. The US importer is Blue Crane Imports and the only retail stockist currently listed on wine-searcher.com is Pearl of New Orleans.
Donovan Rall feels like just about the only South African winemaking young gun I did not meet on my trip there last January but you can find out more about him and the travels and experience that made him at www.rallwines.co.za, where this beautiful landscape is published.
Like most of his ilk, he does not own vineyards and buys most of his fruit from farmers in Swartland (see Young guns of Cape need ammunition). He likes to keep a certain mystery about his fruit sources, presumably for the reasons outlined in this recent article, although he does say that some vineyards are on granite.
This accomplished, confident white is 14% alcohol but has no heaviness at all. It’s a blend of Chenin Blanc, Verdelho, Chardonnay and Viognier but no single variety makes its particular presence felt. The wine includes fruit grown in Bottelary and Heldeberg in Stellenbosch so that the official appellation has to be Coastal.
I loved the fresh, racy nature of this wine and its mere hint of struck match reductive character. This is serious stuff that still has just a slight hint of astringency on the finish as though it has a considerable future ahead of it. I suggest a drinking window of 2015-20 – and a score of 17.5 out of 20 – a very high mark for me. There is finesse, transparency and a suggestion of real articulacy. One mouthful lingers on the palate most impressively.
Whole bunches go into a small, manually operated basket press and the juice is fermented with no added yeast and just a little bit of sulphur in old French barrels. Fermentation lasts for months and the wine is aged on the lees with a little stirring before bottling after a total of 10 months’ ageing. Residual sugar is only just over 2 g/l meaning that the overall impression is of a dry but not austere wine. If this wine carried a famous French appellation it would cost twice or three times as much (though it costs notably more in the US than in Europe – perhaps because the importer or retailer knows that their customers are suspicious of wines that are too cheap).
I contacted Donovan to ask permission to use this image and he tells me he is particularly excited about his 2014 white.
