Mention the name Kanonkop to anyone who knows a thing of two about South African wine and you will get a respectful nod of recognition. But this is not one of South Africa’s big wineries. Rather, it is a big small winery, one that is big on quality in very small quantities when compared to the South African wine labels that you will generally find on supermarket shelves here in Europe.
Kanonkop Wine Collection
What’s more, it is one of the few premium wines from the country that can be found here in Portugal, thanks to Algarve-based importers and distributors Prime Wine, in Loulé.
Kanonkop is a family business, founded by Paul Sauer in 1973 and run today by the fourth generation of the family – brothers Paul and Johann Krige, who I first met in May last year in the town of Chantilly, not far from Paris.
Brothers Paul and Johann Krige
As a wine lover raised in Portugal, my knowledge of wines from other parts of the world is far from vast and, apart from what I discover and taste on my travels, my knowledge is limited to the modest selection of “foreign” wines that could be found here until recently.
My meeting in Chantilly came about last year when I was invited to join part of Kanonkop’s 50th anniversary celebrations that took part in a magnificent chateau and involved vertical tastings of these fine wines from vintages stretching right back to the 1970s.
I was hooked and left in no doubt that these are wines to be taken very seriously. We were tasting wines from across the decades with some vintages from the 1990s still displaying amazing youth and vigour, such as a 1995 Magnum of the estate’s Paul Sauer Bordeaux-style blend.
That trip to France tied in nicely with my first-ever visit to South Africa a few months later enabling me to visit the winery and taste some more of their wines in-situ. This time we tried wines from across the range, all with 10 years of bottle age difference less than the most recently released vintages.
This was the result of a decision taken by the owners just over a decade ago to hold back a certain amount of bottles from each vintage for release 10 years later.
Having already tried their premium labels such as the varietal Pinotage for which they are most famous, the Cabernet Sauvignon and their Paul Sauer blend at the tasting in France, there were no surprises here, just the enjoyment of tasting these great wines once again and being welcomed at the estate.
What really surprised me was the quality of their entry level “Kadette” label wines, of which we had only tried the latest vintages in France. These are wines that sell here in Portugal for around €13; they are good, easy-drinking reds when young but after 10 years of bottle ageing, they punch far, far above the price tag. The grapes used in these wines, that make up the bulk of Kanonkop’s production, come mostly from other growers in the area but the winemaking skill is the same, and it shows.
The grapes for all of their premium labels are grown on the estate, and I was fascinated to see what is called in these parts ‘bush vines’, i.e. vines that are left to grow naturally, without any trellising so that the ‘bushing’ of the leaves creates natural shade. This apparently slows down maturation of the grapes when compared to Pinotage grown on trellised vines, resulting in smaller and more concentrated grapes.
White wine is not produced at Kanonkop, to the extent that they recently acquired the farm next door that grew mostly white grapes and are replanting it with red. What they do produce is a very nice rosé which is consumed mostly in South Africa.
Here in the Algarve, the full range of the estate’s red wines are available from Prime Wine, ranging from the Kadette range (blend, Pinotage and Cabernet Sauvignon) and the main estate label Pinotage, Cabernet Sauvignon varietals, and the Paul Sauer Bordeaux style blend. The most exclusive label of all, Kanonkop’s famous Pinotage Black Label is also available at Prime Wine in very limited quantity.
__
Follow Essential Algarve Magazine on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin for more news!
NO COMMENT