Nouvelle - the next Pinotage?
Thursday, 17 February, 2005
Arnold Kirkby
At least 64 hectares of Nouvelle grapes have been planted in South Africa since promising results were achieved by Boland Kelder's cellarmaster, Altus le Roux, who first blended it with his 2002 Sauvignon Blanc. Le Roux intends taking this newly introduced hybrid grape a step further by launching the wine as a single varietal in the next few months.
This will be the third hybridised South African varietal to be planted in commercial quantities and the second to be sold as a stand-alone varietal. Because of its initial rarity value, it will be sold at around R60 a bottle and only about 400 cases will be made available. The rest will go into the cellar’s Sauvignon Blanc wines, where it has helped to give Boland the edge in producing better quality wines from warmer regions.
This is only the second known commercial South African wine to be bottled from vines that were hybridised in South Africa. The other was Pinotage, of which more than 6 800 hectares have been planted.
What is Nouvelle and where did it originate?
It’s recent history goes back to the KWV plant improvement team, which had the vines in small mother-blocks retained from the time that the hybrid was created between 1958 and 1962 by Professor Chris Orffer and his team at Stellenbosch University.
In the early 1990s many British wine writers and buyers wrote South African Sauvignon Blanc off because they felt it could not do as well as New Zealand. Slowly but surely they have been proved wrong.
As demand grew for this varietal, plantings in cooler climates could not keep up with demand and so wine buyers looked further inland, but these wines did not have the heady pyrazines, which give Sauvignon Blanc grassy, green pepper aromas and flavours.
It was around 1994 that Nico Spreeth and his team at KWV made small batches of wines from Nouvelle and started introducing them to winemakers and viticulturists around the winelands. Nobody really expressed interest in this unknown and untested varietal until Nico presented the wines to Altus, who in turn convinced the Geldenhuys brothers, suppliers who farm at Klipvlei near Perdeberg Mountain, to plant an experimental block in 1997.
They now have a 1.2 hectares of Nouvelle. In 2002 the first Sauvignon Blanc, with Nouvelle blended with it, walked off with the South African Young Wine Show Trophy for champion wine in its class. In 2004 the Nouvelle collected the trophy for Other White Cultivar at the same competition.
When Professor Orffer was invited to Boland’s Noorder-Paarl cellar to taste the must from this year’s harvest, he expressed amazement at the aroma and palate. He said he was happy that after more than forty years the varietal was receiving the recognition it deserved.
In his seventy-ninth year, Professor Orffer is still busy with organic wine, vegetable, herb and fruit research, even though he retired from Stellenbosch University many years ago. He operates from his home in Morreesburg, where he lives with his wife, Jeanette.
He remembers fondly those early days when they were searching for the solutions to many of the problems relating to vineyard pests and sicknesses.
He is emphatic that the glory of finding the Nouvelle, or Grass 26 varietal as it was then known, was a team effort and that everybody working under him played pivotal roles in trying to improve the vines supplied to wine farmers then.
Those were the days before it had been resolved that Cape Riesling was in fact Crouchen Blanc, a varietal from South Western France and not related to Rhine Riesling as thought for many years.
'We were in fact trying to find a way of eliminating botrytis in Cape Riesling. Crossing it with Semillon, another varietal with high pyrazines, was one of the many combinations we experimented with.
'You must remember those were the early days of natural white wine production in South Africa. Even then, however, I remember saying that because it had such strong characteristics, this wine would work well if blended with Sauvignon Blanc.
'Isn’t it wonderful to have experienced the last fifty years - there has been an absolute revolution in the wine industry and this varietal is a part of it,' he said before heading off to inspect the vineyard.