My pick of the reds at this year’s upcoming Cape Winemakers Guild Auction is the 2007 vintage Rodanos blend of Syrah and Grenache made by Neil Ellis. The other shoe dropped when I tasted GT Ferreira’s Zondernaam 2007 Shiraz/Grenache blend last week in the Whale Well at the National Museum in Cape Town during the launch of the new vintages from Tokara. And now the third 2007 SG has popped up in Upington. Called the Olive Brook Côte du Rhône Village, it will be in Tops at Spar stores before Christmas, keenly priced at under R80 a bottle.

Blended by Tinus van Niekerk, wine consultant to Spar and recently installed as an officier in the Legion d’Honneur du Merité Agricole, it is a 60:40 Syrah:Grenache blend from an ancient vineyard outside the village of St. Catherine, home to 902 souls. The Grenache vineyard was planted in 1934 and the Syrah vines are on average 30 years old. The result is a blend of awesome intensity and balance – so full of character no wood maturation was deemed necessary. US pundit Robert Parker agrees and scores the wine 95/100.

Tinus (l) and Abe (r) in Upington this afternoon

As Abé Beukes, winemaker at Darling Cellars and formerly Shiraz superstar at Lievland noted “this wine muddles your mind.” Neither of us could believe the fruit intensity and lack of oak maturation. The 2007 vintage was an annus mirabilis in the Rhône and the Olive Brook will slay a couple of Swartland sacred cows. With supermarkets retailing 95 point Parker wines at well under R100 countrywide, Schalk Burger’s Nederburg Auction comment that “bottle stores are not the place to be at the moment” looks a sure thing. All music to the ears of wine lovers on a budget and anathema to anoraques and wine snobs.

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