Échanson Honoraire George Parkes once again opened the cellar in his Kynsna home to an invited group of Bailliage of Cape Town wine enthusiasts. This year the theme was “blended whites”.

George coordinated the selection of wines with Peter Bishop, aka “PeeBee”, complementary food was plated and served by Ilse van Staden, the courses having been supplied by Bailli Délégué Honoraire François Ferreira and Vice-Conseiller Culinaire Denise Lindley.

Wines were not covered in the normal blind-tasting bags but served “open” in flights of three or four. The original intention was to taste only 12 but we finished up with 27!

It is worth mentioning that in the New World the blending of white wines - or at least the way it is done with no common geographic links - could very well be unique to South Africa, as unique as Pinotage.

History has proven the classic blend (as in Bordeaux) to be Semillon/Sauvignon (as in Bordeaux). However, the tasting showed that there are ‘Paint by Number’ blends. A bit of this, a bit of that and let’s see how something else works, almost as if the marketer’s intention and mind-set was “the more, the better and hence - more expensive”. And yet there were several very honest and honourable blends.

From our tasting experience, we concluded that:

- there is a definite place as a fine wine for the traditional Bordeaux-style blend of Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc;

- there is a place for (other) multi-blended whites;

- some of the new-direction multi-blends seem to have the components fighting each other - will they really benefit by bottle maturation we wondered;

- there seems to be the tendency to think that the more components, the greater will be the demand, or even the greater the quality and hence the higher the price;

- the multi-blend movement might be more than a blessing in disguise as it brings in the sales providing diversity and jobs.

Prepared from an extensive “tasting notes” style report provided by
Peter Bishop (“PeeBee”), Vice-Chargé de Presse of Cape Town

NB. For those who might be interested, the full set of notes and comments is available by clicking here