Judging of the 13th running of the ABSA Top Ten Pinotage Competition kicked off at the Devon Valley Hotel this morning. Proceedings started with seven judges being given a pep-talk by chairman Duimpie Bayly, who noted in passing that he’s the world’s best judge of faulty wines. Not that we found too many faults in the 70-odd we tasted between 9h30 and 14h00.

Judging Pinotage in Devon Valley this morning

140 wines have been entered and they were tasted blind by vintage and were discussed after each flight (2 from 2004, 6 from 2005, 20-odd from 2006 and the bulk from 2007 with the remainder of the 07′s and all the 08′s to be tackled tomorrow). As expected, the first coffee/mocha example elicited wildly different scores, 17+ from yours truly and 17 (out of 20) from foreign judge Allan Cheesman, former Buying Director for perishable goods at UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, responsible (in particular) for wine purchases and 100 buyers of produce.

The anti-coffee brigade was lead by respected retired Stellenbosch winemaker François Naudé whose l’Avenir Pinotage was in the Top Ten a record breaking seven times in ten years. François argued strongly for a universal criterion of “good wine” with French claret the quoted example while we argued equally strongly for commercial reality which sees these coffee/mocha wines fly off the shelf.

François and friends scored them in the 14/15 range. I think our argument that coffee/mocha was a valid style and if we ignored it, producers of that expression would simply boycott the competition – something Anthony Hamilton Russell is already doing with his excellent Ashbourne, claiming that the competition would not recognize the style.

But good news, Mr. Sonnenberg. A Starbucks stunner in the last flight was rated 17 by François who raved about the juicy fruit lurking beneath all that toasty oak. Which is a victory for Pinotage, for as Duimpie pointed out, “it shows how versatile Pinotage is.”

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