Witty Winemaker in South Africa

In yesterday's New York Times article, In South Africa, He Let the Goats Out, renowned wine writer Frank Prial, describes the clever antics of South African winemaker, Charles Back.

He makes a wine , Goats do Roam, made of seven grape varieties: pinotage, syrah, cinsault, grenache, carignan, gamay and mourvèdre. It is affectionately named after the roaming goats on his property. According to the back label, the grapes are "personally selected "by the rampant Fairview goats as they roam the vineyards for the ripest fruit." Made in a California winemaking style, Prial describes the current 2001 release as, "...rich, fruity wine with considerable concentration and flavors of licorice, sweet spices and ripe plums."

Back also makes a white, Goats do Roam Too, made from various varieties, including viognier and grenache blanc.

He may have picked perfect time to market his wines. According Prial, vintners are working to re-establish themselves in the world wine market. They are recovering from 40 years of economic isolation brought on by apartheid,

But they have had more to overcome than just the impact of the sanctions, lifted in the early 1990's. For most of the 20th century, the wine industry here was controlled by a government-backed cooperative organization known as the KWV, which set prices, production quotas, growing areas, even the varieties of grapes to be planted.

A quarantine system made the importation of good vines virtually impossible. Chardonnay, for example, was banned. Defiant winemakers who produced it had to devise other names under which to bottle it. Chenin blanc, called steen, was South Africa's principal wine grape and much of what was exported was indifferent "port," "sherry" and grape-juice concentrate

Related Links:
· New York Times
· Wines of Charles Back