HANtv Episode CHAPTER INDEX:
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0:00 – Cold Open: Merlot Gets Executed in Public
1:28 – The Apparent Global Merlot Crisis
2:36 – The Wine of the Day
2:46 – Some Notes on the 2014 South African Vintage
3:02 – The Banana Lecture (Ripeness, Explained)
4:34 – Phenolic Ripeness in Grapes
6:34 – The Belgians Who Did the Maths: Meet Almenkerk
9:49 – Tasting Notes: Almenkerk Merlot 2023
12:11 – Green Notes Are Trendy Again. Go Figure!
13:05 – Tasting Notes: Almenkerk Merlot 2014
14:39 – What Do the Technical Specs Tell Us?
15:42 – The Whisper Defence
16:41 – Merlot’s Real Tragedy
17:32 – Outro
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At the 2026 Trophy Wine Show feedback session, a panel that included Oz Clarke tasted twenty-five South African Merlots and found most of them bitter and tannic. One judge suggested we would never have planted the grape if it were harder to pronounce. For most South African Merlot, they have a point. The country has about 4,900 hectares of it, and roughly 98% grows somewhere warm, where sugar races ahead and the skins and seeds never catch up. This video is about the other 2%.
In 2002 Joris and Nathalie van Almenkerk arrived in Elgin, the coldest wine region in the country, with no family farming wisdom and a serious appetite for soil studies, solar maps and climate reports. The data told them to plant Merlot twenty years before the judges called it a cool climate grape in a hot world. To test the idea, I opened the Almenkerk Merlot 2023 next to the same wine from 2014, a vintage most of the country wrote off. Both sit at Alc. 13.5%, nine vintages apart, and together they make the case that the problem was never the grape. It was the address.
But of course, if you have yet to sign up for your Monthly HanDrinksSolo Wine Subscription then you’ll have to hunt this wine down in your own time. But until then, here are my tasting notes and some technical specs:
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TASTING NOTES
Aromas: Straight after the pour this is tidy and slightly reserved: cocoa dust, blackcurrant and black cherry, with a little sour red cherry riding shotgun. Give it fifteen minutes and it starts unpacking its luggage. A lift of fresh thyme arrives, then lavender (the fresh sprig, not your gran’s soap drawer), and the blackcurrant settles deeper. The 2014 alongside it shows bay leaf, a hint of game, dried leaves, smoke and prune, with a maraschino cherry still sitting in the middle.
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Palate: Medium weighted, with clean fruit, tannins with just enough grip to be taken seriously, and fresh acid holding the whole thing upright. There is a touch of herbal leafiness, and the finish turns savoury, almost cherry tomato skin savoury. This is a wine with excellent diction rather than a long echo. Open it before you start making dinner, not as you are plating it.
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TECHNICAL SPECS
Wine of Origin Elgin, from Almenkerk Wine Estate, where some of the valley’s vineyards sit close to 700 metres above sea level and the cloud banks rolling in off the Cape South Coast keep the whole bowl cool. The 2014 tasted alongside it carries the same alcohol, nine vintages apart.
Alc. 13.5% |
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