The Making of Pinotage

Every wine grape has a story, but almost none of them have a birthday. Pinotage does — 1925, in a university garden in Stellenbosch — and the century since is one of the more improbable arcs in wine: a lab curiosity that became a national symbol, crashed into infamy, and clawed its way back to respect. Part 1 made the case for the grape as it stands today. This part is how it got here, because you can't really judge Pinotage until you know what it survived.

The professor and his four seedlings

The man to thank — or blame — is Abraham Izak Perold, Stellenbosch University's first professor of viticulture and, by every account, a restless experimenter. In 1925 he set out to breed a grape that would give the Cape the best of two worlds: the finesse and perfume of Pinot Noir, and the heat-hardy, reliably ripening bulk of Cinsaut — then known locally as Hermitage. He crossed the two by hand, coaxed the seeds into four tiny seedlings, and planted them in the garden of his official residence at Welgevallen.

Then the story turns almost comic. Perold left the university a few years later to take a job at the KWV, and the seedlings sat unattended in the garden of a house he no longer lived in. The plot was due to be cleared. As the folklore has it, a clean-up crew was days — or a young lecturer's bicycle ride — away from grubbing the whole garden out when a university man named Charlie Niehaus recognised the seedlings for what they were and rescued them. Whatever the exact truth of the rescue, the outcome is not in doubt: four plants that nearly ended up on a bonfire became the entire genetic origin of South Africa's signature grape.

Pinotage exists because somebody noticed four unremarkable seedlings in a garden that was about to be cleared. The Cape's national grape is the wine world's greatest near-miss.

From cutting to bottle: the slow decades

The rescue was only the start. Turning a novel cross into a wine took another thirty years and a different set of hands. The viticulturist CT de Waal took up the vine, propagated it, and is credited with the first experimental Pinotage wine — and the De Waal family's Uiterwyk estate in the Polkadraai hills still farms some of the oldest surviving Pinotage vines in the country, a living thread back to those first plantings.

The grape earned its portmanteau name early — Pinot-plus-Hermit-age — but it stayed a specialist's project for years. The turning point came at the end of the 1950s. The 1959 vintage, bottled and released under the Lanzerac label in 1961, is generally cited as the first commercial Pinotage: the moment the grape crossed from experiment into commerce.¹ Lanzerac, a three-hundred-year-old manor at the mouth of the Jonkershoek valley, is where you can still taste that lineage on its home ground.

What happened next set the trap. In the early 1960s, Pinotage started winning show trophies — the young grape, suddenly, was a champion. Fame arrived before understanding did.

The wilderness years

Success is what nearly ruined Pinotage. A trophy-winning novelty that also happened to ripen early and shrug off Cape heat was irresistible to plant, and through the 1970s and '80s it went into the ground fast and got cropped hard for volume. The problem is that Pinotage is an honest grape: farm it lazily and make it carelessly, and it tells on you loudly.

Picked over-ripe and fermented too hot, Pinotage develops volatile, solvent-like aromas — the isoamyl-acetate whiff of banana and nail varnish, and the notorious note that came to be called burnt rubber. A generation of drinkers met the grape through exactly these bottles: cheap, over-extracted, acetone-edged reds that seemed to prove every snobbish suspicion about South African wine. By the late 1980s "Pinotage" was, for a lot of the wine world, shorthand for something to avoid. The reputation was earned. That's the uncomfortable part of the story that its champions sometimes skip: the burnt-rubber Pinotage was real, and there was a lot of it.

The turnaround

The revival is the part worth celebrating, and it happened in the space of about twenty-five years. Several things changed at once.

• Viticulture grew up. Growers stopped over-cropping, dropped yields, and paid attention to picking dates — catching the fruit before the over-ripeness that fed the volatile faults.
• Winemaking cooled down. Gentler extraction, better temperature control and more thoughtful oak replaced the hot, punishing cellar work that had exaggerated every flaw.
• The old bush vines got their due. Unirrigated, low-yielding old Pinotage — the kind Kanonkop draws on from dryland Simonsberg vines planted in the 1950s — turned out to give the concentrated, structured, ageworthy reds the grape had always been capable of.
• A trade body took up the cause. The Pinotage Association, formed to promote and lift quality, gave the grape a champion and a benchmark to chase.

The result is a grape living a double life, which is where the modern argument really begins. At one end, benchmark estates now make Pinotage that stands comparison with the world's serious reds. At the other, a deliberately commercial, mocha-and-chocolate style sells in enormous volume and drives purists to distraction. Both are made from Perold's cross; both are honestly called Pinotage; and they are almost unrelated drinking experiences.

That split — the single most useful thing to understand before you ever buy a bottle — is the whole subject of the next part.

The making of Pinotage is a story of survival: rescued as a seedling, ruined by its own early fame, and rebuilt by a generation that finally learned how to farm and ferment it. Now it stands, but as two very different wines wearing one name.

That's next. Part 3 — The Two Pinotages is the style civil war in full: the coffee-and-chocolate crowd-pleaser versus the serious dry-farmed old-vine red, why the two camps can't stand each other, and how to read a label so you always know which one you're about to open.