MICHAEL FRIDJHON | The alchemy of wine blending is making the whole greater than its parts

Michel Rolland, the French oenologist who died earlier this year, was admired and reviled in more or less equal measure. For those who liked ripe, polished, often sumptuously styled reds, he was the man who knew how to “fix” whatever it was that caused wines, especially cabernet-based examples, to be angular and gawky. For those who sought texture with a little geekiness, he was responsible for the over-opulence of modern trophy brands.

Consulting oenologists are not usually bathed in the limelight. Rolland’s notoriety was partly due to Mondovino, a 2004 documentary made by Jonathan Nossiter. Nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, it exposed the impact of globalisation on wine. In it, Rolland is shown as a cynical technologist using interventionist winemaking strategies to achieve his “international style”, irrespective of the origin of the grapes.

I didn’t know Rolland well, but I have had enough experience of his work to say that the film did him a grave injustice. His most remarkable attribute was his ability to assemble a blend whose component parts were harmonious and complementary. Getting a wine to “hold together” is not difficult. Getting something greater than the sum of the parts (without throwing out everything that doesn’t fit the model) is a rare attribute.

I thought about Rolland and his extraordinary blending skills often on the morning I judged the 80 entries in the 43rd annual Blaauwklippen blending competition. Each of the entrants receives the identical component parts from the same cask. They have to use all four, none less than 5% and none more than 60%. Obviously the number of permutations is vast. In reality most people blend using round(ish) amounts, which rather narrows things down. What was fascinating was the unanimity of the judges in identifying the top candidates and thereafter, in the final line-up, with the winning wine.

A day later I had a second occasion to admire the art of blending when I attended a vertical tasting of the first five releases of the rarest red produced at Tokara (and possibly the most expensive Cape wine available in general distribution). The wine, a 1,000-bottle release called Telos (meaning “ultimate purpose”), is produced mainly from a single high-altitude block of cabernet vines on decomposed granite, Table Mountain sandstone and gravel. Within the site there are two zones, of which only one (0.68ha) produces the Telos fruit. Normalised difference vegetation index readings obtained from satellite images have identified this site within a site where the fruit will always be superior. Small additions (initially merlot but now mainly petit verdot) contribute to the end result.

The first vintage was the 2015. It is now fully integrated, very polished, fragrant, supple and dangerously easy to drink. It differs from the vintages that followed, for reasons I suspect go beyond the mere presence of merlot in the blend. All the others — 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 — are more what you would expect of a fine bordeaux of comparable age: evident tannins still locking cogs with each other and with the intensity of the oak (roughly two-thirds new) layered through the relatively long cask ageing (22 months).

All are already accessible but all would profit from much longer bottle maturation, the 2017 and the 2019 especially. Winemaker Stuart Botha (who assembled all but the 2015 and vinified the three youngest vintages) has hand-crafted the various building blocks on which a wine like Telos depends. But what he has also done is made the best blend from the casks at his disposal. Yes, he’s had the luxury of being able to cherry-pick his best barrels. But he hasn’t lost sight of what makes Telos authentic. It’s not simply a wine that should taste like the R5,000+ it costs. It needs also to be an expression of place. Sometimes that means leaving out a soupçon of fabulous juice to catch the raw intensity of the rocky, high-altitude Simonsberg site.

Business Day