I'm impressed at the increasing number of producers who have online tasting notes for their wines. I find them very helpful when I'm tasting wines at home. It's not quite the same obviously as being in a class and hearing others describe the wine but they are a useful comparison to what I'm getting from the wine.
Take the 2 chardonnays I tried the other day, one South African and the other Kiwi. With the Zonnebloem 2007 from Stellenbosch, I got vanilla from the oak and yet it's not mentioned in the producer's notes but I also got what they describe as citrus notes, pear and peach. The tasting note also said all the fruit for that vintage was sourced from vineyards in the Stellenbosch whereas the label describes itself as "Wine from the Western Cape".
The Montana 2007 from Gisborne I thought had lovely lime and lemon flavours with some tropical fruit. They mentioned peaches also but I couldn't get that.
What I've learned from the WSET Diploma studies is that there is a large element of subjectivity in tasting. Just because the producer says peach, and I don't detect it, doesn't mean I am wrong. It just means the palate of the winemaker is more attuned to nuances than mine which you would expect. Alternatively, and not that I'm being cynical, that the PR person has got carried away with the descriptors in a bid to talk up the wine!
4 comments:
I think you do yourself a disservice. Indeed back lables should be taken with a pinch of salt as the PR person is likely to get a bit rampant but as a WSET student you should be able to pick up your own nuances.
You need to trust your own abilities to detect things that spark some form of recognition to you. I hadnt a clue what a guava smelt or tasted like during my studies so I went out and brought a whole host of different tropical fruit - from lychees to mango, kiwi to strawberry to aid my 'associations'.
I was having fun trying to tell the difference (blind) between black and green olives the other day!
The link you give to the merchant that sells the Zonnebloem says of it
"The grapes were sourced from low-yield, trellised vineyards in and around Stellenbosch, including Jonkershoek, Stellenbosch Kloof, Koelenhof, Helderberg, Polkadraai and Malmesbury. The average age of the vineyards at the time of harvesting was 19 years."
Well, Malmesbury is around Stellenbosch only by a stretch of imagination -- and it certainly isn't in the Stellenbosch appellation, it is in the Swartland area. You have a map of the SA winlands, and you'll see the town of Malmesbury on it. So since the grapes come from different appellations it has the wider area Western Cape appellation.
Its abit naughty of the of the label to capitalise on the well known Stellenbosch name.
Funnily enough the Zonnebloem site itself just says 'handpicked in 18 year old vineyards' without specifyingwhere they are. I doubt all the vineyards in the areas named above all all exactly 18 years old.
Zonnebloem is just a brand name owned by the large Distel wine company and the source of grapes will vary. Perhaps the label saying Stellenbosh refers to a previous vintage.
That's really interesting Peter. I know the retailer - I was at their small tasting a couple of weeks ago - and know they don't write their own tasting notes so I had naively thought they had "borrowed" the producer's.
So there is another lesson here apart from trust your own palate which is be very careful when a wine is promoted as being from a particular region. A good knowledge of geography helps.
BTW, I like your blog. It's good to hear a S African voice. I really enjoyed my Diploma SA studies and it so makes me want to visit SA.
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