Reward your palate with this rare treat

Truth be told, I am not a pinotage fan, says Matthew Jukes. But this wine from the Spice Route Winery is very much the exception.

Matthew Jukes
By
published
in Features

791-Spice

2014 Spice Route Winery, Pinotage, South Africa (£11.99, Slurp.co.uk; WineDirect.co.uk; Dunell's Premier Wines of Jersey, 01534-736418; Noel Young Wines of Trumpington, 01223-566744).

I have known the winemaker and visionary owner of Spice Route, Charles Back, for many years. He is a straight-talking, hard-working, tough man with a highly tuned palate. In all the years I have known him he has never poured me a duff wine and I must have tasted nigh on 500 of his creations. He has, however, stopped me in my tracks more often than most.

His farm shop, microbrewery, cheese emporium and wine destination (he is the man behind wine label "Goats do Roam") in Paarl in the Western Cape province of South Africa is one of the best in the Cape. He knows what we want to drink andhe makes modern wines to satiate our desires and this even extends to the ultra-Marmite red grape pinotage.

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Truth be told, I am not a pinotage fan. I find one or two each year to feature in my Daily Mail Weekend Magazine column and only one has ever graced this page (in a decade of columns). But I taste everything that moves and let you know when a wine moves me and this week it just happens to be a pinotage.

Class, spice, damson, cinnamon and plum cavort and the gloss on the palate is remarkable. It's a steal, too. Reward your palate with a very rare treat this week.

Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year (MatthewJukes.com).

Matthew Jukes
Matthew Jukes

Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.  

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’.  He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner. 

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy.  His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.

 

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