Possibly the world's rarest commercial wine!

[Glen]

Hi All

On Thursday night, a few of us got together at the Victory Hotel to welcome Ric to SA. I won't go into detail otherwise we will rob Ric of part of his Tour Diary, I will say though that it was a great night with some very enjoyable wine, and a rather 'curio' wine to say the least.

Regarding the curio, I purchased this particular bottle in Stellenbosch last year from a winery called Hartenberg. The variety is PONTAC which is a teinturier (red fleshed) grape and the back label states that it is the only commercially produced Pontac in the world (btw Pontac is of French origin).

I was also told an interesting story about this grape and its evolution in the South African wine industry from the winery when I was there. It goes something like this, during the early days of viticulture in SAf, they had many pests just like most countries, but whereas we would encounter rabbits, kangaroos, hares and birds, their biggest problem was baboons!

The Baboons marauding ways were such, that they would pluck fruit from as close to the outskirts as possible and make a dash for it, however once the first row of vines were picked clean, they would slowly venture further and further into the vineyard depths, and hence slowly but surely wipe out an enormous portion of the fruit yield over several weeks.

Being a teinturier grape (if anyone has had the pleasure of picking these grapes, they are really very dark coloured and stain your hands horrifically), some bright young South African first decided to plant these in the outer rows of their vineyards so that the white fleshed and 'higher quality' grapes were in the middle.
The outcome being that once the baboons grabbed the teinturier grapes from the outlying rows, and then looked at their hands, they thought they were bleeding and did not like this very much at all. This had the effect of decreasing quite dramatically the percentage of yield lost to marauding baboons.

Unfortunately nowadays that people have wiped out most things due to urban sprawl, the baboons aren't really much of a problem anymore and there is no need to continue this viticultural practice.

As for the wine, it was the first of the night and I love a good options game, so this wine had everybody completely stuffed. Most thought it was a Spanish grape, or Italian Sangiovese. The nose was quite perfumed and floral (purple violets) and there was something else I couldn't put my finger on, low tannin content lended itself to a smooth structure
with a slight donut effect. My partner loved this wine, so she took the 1/4 bottle leftovers home, and the next day this wine had very strong Fynbos character. This is a marvellous aroma of wild South African vegetation, similar to, but different from thatched roofing.
Nobody disliked this wine, but then none of the others loved it either.


HELP:
I have some pics of this bottle and label to post but are unsure how to post these, if I can send them to somebody to put on the net with a reference URL I will come back and put them into the article???

[Grant]

Glen,


Nice story. I've got one of those sitting in the cellar waiting to be aired, a CHATEAU LORAINE (OREGON) MARECHAL FOCH 2000. Organic seppo wine, made by a Kiwi in the middle of no-where in Oregon. I was playing a tournament on the BUY.COM Tour near Eugene,about to go out for a practice round and Osama bombed the Twin Towers. Tournament gets called off,so I had some time to kill,went for a wander around the countryside and found this place. Wines were OK,and I bought this one because I know that I'll win any options game I enter with it ! Tried some others,including King Estate,the landmark winery of the area,but the wines were really average,especially the pinots,insipid lolly water for $50 US.

Hope I don't blow my cover with this story,don't want anyone to get the jump on my surprise! (Better keep this away from those blow ins on that other forum!)


Cheers

[GraemeG]

Glen,


Nice story. I've got one of those sitting in the cellar waiting to be aired, a CHATEAU LORAINE (OREGON) MARECHAL FOCH 2000.

Cheers

Grant, if you wanted more info on that wine, Paul B over on the WLDG is the hybrid guru of the Internet world. He could likely tell you where you patrticular bottle fits in the hierarchy of 'Great MF's of the World'.

cheers,
Graeme
(still smarting from 40 putts on Saturday - and my course doesn't have large greens...)

[Grant]

I should clarify my comment re, "blow ins", I was due to taste some wines with a number of them tonight,had to pull the pin but just wanted to make sure that the "tongue in cheek" nature of my phrase wasn't mis-interpreted!

Cheers

(40 putts-ouch! You need to get in touch with your feminine side more!!)