I have read the news, and it ain’t great. However brightly the sun shines this summer, it looks like I will be paying more to my mortgage holding bank and less to my favourite payees: winemaker friends and The Liquor control Board of Ontario and their intrepid importing agents. Tant pis. I will survive with help from my overseas friends in South Africa.
Full disclosure: those friends from the Western Cape, in the guise of the professional organization, Wines of South Africa, sent me half dozen bottles of white wine last week. There was public relations involved. Something about International Chenin Blanc Day and also some kind of air miles promotion at my home province liquor retail monopoly this month. For details you could, as my favourite Roman tour guide Agnes Crawford says, “Give it a Google.”
All of the wines WOSA sent me had one thing in common, beyond the PR: they all cost less than 20 Canadian dollars for a 750 millilitre bottle. Most of the wines had something else in common: they were made with the Chenin Blanc grape. Nicknamed Steen in Afrikaans, Chenin Blanc is South Africa’s most planted, having been brought by French Huguenot refugees in the 17th century and quickly used to make brandy by the Cape Dutch.
All the wines sent to me were fine, and great value. There is no retail shelf that offers a higher quality to price ratio than the South African one. That is as much a testament to the country’s continuing sad political economy than anything else. The winemakers in The Cape seem to rarely catch a break, whether it’s the value of the Rand or economic policies set by a government in Pretoria that seem to hamper trade more than encourage it. Bad for them, but good for us winos on a budget.
Two of those Chenin Blanc wines stand out from the pack, and both are the products of two respective dynamic and outspoken winemakers: Ken Forrester and Ross Sleet.
Forrester was a restauranteur from Johannesburg who caught the wine bug and bought a farm in the Stellenbosch thirty years ago. His neighbours assumed he’d pull up the Chenin Blanc vines and replace them with the grapes on trend at the time: Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. No way; he stuck to his guns and has been one of the country’s greatest advocates for Chenin.
Forrester makes the FMC Chenin: the “M” might stand for marvellous, and you can imagine what the “F” might stand for. It’s sought after around the world, and sells out at least triple price of the Ken Forrester Old Vine Reserve Chenin Blanc, for which a bottle of the 2021 vintage will put you back just $18.95 in both Upper and Lower Canada, and more or less the same at points east and west.
At it’s best, Chenin Blanc will show crisp and bright fruit, like green apple or ripe peach, over top a honeydew weight and roundness. That’s the trick: vibrant acidity nestled into a mellow and fulsome flavour. Forrester’s Old Vine Reserve pulls it off with a lemon and lime note, bringing water to the mouth, and triggering an instinct for another sip.
Founder and Managing Director Ross Sleet once told me that Rascallion wasn’t a wine company but an attitude. Well, that’s just fine by me because for $16.95 in Ontario, The 2022 From The Cape With Love Chenin Blanc is a disposition I can appreciate. Here the fruit notes go from mandarine to tinned tangerine, starting round then with a lovely lift on the finish. This is a party wine; an aperitif that can pair with itself, or any snack.
The under-$20 bottle of decent wine is becoming a rarity. Input costs, whether it’s labour or energy, have increased across the world. At the same time the Canadian dollar’s value seems like in steady and perpetual decline (see above about the news). What made sense to sell at $19.95 now only makes sense at $22.95 or more. Maybe that’s not a big rise in price, but psychologically it counts, and it hurts.
The South Africans can certainly make fancy and expensive bottles of wine. Forrester does, as do labels like Radford and Dale, Bouchard Finalyson, Mullineux, Raats, A.D. Badenhorst, Reyneke, Rustenberg, and the Sadie Family. Those are just a few that I cam up with without giving a Google. At $50 or more a bottle, retail, they’ll compete with anything made anywhere at a premium standard.
But there are still a lot of good old vines left in the Western Cape. Old vines of Chenin Blanc in particular. It’s our good fortune that there are enough—and there is enough capacity at wineries like Forrester’s or Rascallion—to make democratic wines. Good wines for all the people…for less than 20 bucks. Thanks to our friends in the south.
