The Two Pinotages: Coffee vs Classic

Here's the thing that will save you from ever being disappointed by Pinotage: the word on the label is telling you almost nothing until you know which of the two Pinotages you're holding. In Part 2 we followed the grape from a rescued seedling through infamy to revival. That revival didn't produce one wine — it produced two, and they are so different that a wine critic and a supermarket shopper can hold violently opposed opinions of "Pinotage" while both being exactly right about the bottle in front of them.

The coffee Pinotage

Start with the one you're most likely to meet, because it sells in enormous volume. The coffee style — sometimes badged mocha, chocolate, or barista right there on the front label — is a modern South African invention, and an unapologetic crowd-pleaser. It tastes of espresso, mocha, dark chocolate and sweet vanilla over soft, ripe dark fruit; it's smooth, low in tannin, faintly sweet, and immediately, uncomplicatedly likeable.

The crucial thing to understand is that none of that coffee character comes from the grape. It's a winemaking effect, drawn mostly from heavily toasted oak — charred staves or barrels — working on very ripe fruit, sometimes with a touch of residual sweetness to round the edges. No coffee goes into the tank. It's real Pinotage, made in a particular, deliberately engineered way. Diemersfontein, in Wellington, is the estate usually credited with taking the style mainstream in the early 2000s, and its Coffee Pinotage spawned a whole sub-genre that now fills supermarket shelves across the country and beyond.

Purists loathe it. They see a great grape reduced to a flavoured soft drink, its identity buried under toasted oak. They're not entirely wrong — but neither are the millions of people who simply enjoy an easy, chocolatey glass of red on a Tuesday. The coffee style is what it is: a wine built for pleasure, not for ageing, and honest about it.

Nobody drinks coffee Pinotage to contemplate terroir. They drink it because it's delicious and asks nothing of them — and there's no shame in that, as long as you know it's not the whole grape.

The classic Pinotage

Now the other wine entirely. The classic, serious style is what Pinotage does when a good grower and winemaker treat it as a fine red rather than a commercial product. This is dry, not sweet. Its fruit is ripe blackberry, plum and mulberry, but it's laid over a savoury, smoky base — the earthy bramble-and-rooibos note that is Pinotage's true fingerprint — with firm tannins, deep colour, and real length. The best of it is built to age a decade or more, and it does.

The raw material is usually old, dry-farmed bush vines: unirrigated, low-yielding, deep-rooted plants that concentrate the fruit and tame the grape's tendency to over-ripeness. The oak here is restraint itself — supporting the fruit, not smothering it. This is the Pinotage that wins international respect, the bottle you pour for a sceptic to end the argument. From Kanonkop's benchmark off 1950s Simonsberg bush vines to Kaapzicht's single-vineyard Steytler in the Bottelary hills, this is the grape at full stretch — and it tastes nothing like the coffee wine.

The style war

The two camps genuinely don't get along, and it's worth understanding why the argument runs so hot. To the classicists, coffee Pinotage is a betrayal — it took the country's own grape, the one that finally clawed back its reputation, and turned it into a manufactured flavour that reinforces every lazy idea about it being unserious. To the coffee style's defenders, the purists are gatekeepers sneering at a wine that got a whole new generation drinking South African red and kept a lot of cellars in business.

Both have a point, which is why the war never ends. The honest position is the one the grape itself forces on you: judge the bottle, not the grape. A brilliant classic Pinotage and a slick coffee one are both legitimately Pinotage; they simply have nothing to do with each other in the glass. Blaming the grape for the coffee style is like blaming Chardonnay for the sweetest supermarket blend — the variety is innocent; the choices are everything.

How to read a label and know which you're getting

You don't need to guess. The label and the price, read together, will tell you almost every time. Here's the map.

The single most reliable signal is the tasting note on the back. Mocha, chocolate and vanilla, with words like smooth and easy, mean a wine made for charm — buy it if that's what you want, and enjoy it without apology. Earth, spice, firm tannin and ageworthy mean a wine built to last — give it decanting and time. Neither is wrong. Knowing which one you're buying is the entire skill, and now you have it.

You can tell the two Pinotages apart on the shelf now. The next question is whose to trust — because the serious style didn't rebuild itself. Specific people, at specific estates, made the case bottle by bottle, and one of them practically invented the modern grape's reputation twice over.

That's next. Part 4 — The Producers Who Redeemed Pinotage is the roll call: Kanonkop the benchmark, Beyerskloof the champion, the old-vine and new-wave names pushing the grape somewhere new — and the Cape Blend, the red style invented to give Pinotage a home in company.