Kaapzicht Rooiland Pinotage 2022 (No.507)

by | Oct 22, 2026 | One minute waffles | 0 comments

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#507 Kaapzicht Rooiland Pinotage 2022

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Kaapzicht Rooiland Pinotage 2022 bottle
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Beaujolais spent thirty years living down its own marketing. In 1951 the new wine was allowed to be sold early, Georges Duboeuf worked out that a wine with a birthday was too juicy a story to resist, and at the peak he alone was moving over a million cases a year in America. But to make that much wine that fast you ferment hot and quick with yeast strains that pump out isoamyl acetate, the compound that smells exactly like banana, and you sell it before it has finished being wine. In 2001 a French critic looked at the lake of unsold Nouveau and called it, in print, un vin de merde. The gimmick ate the grape, and the world forgot that Beaujolais also makes wines that can have you thinking you’re drinking Burgundy without mortgaging the house.

Pinotage ran the same parabola backwards. Serious first, when Beyers Truter’s Kanonkop took the trophy for best winemaker in the world in 1991. Then the gimmick, when charred oak and a chosen yeast turned it into coffee and chocolate by the container-load. Kaapzicht is the one hill where all three chapters sit in bottle at once, and Rooiland is the wine in the middle: the one that kept the ripeness and took the makeup off.

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: Black cherry, juicy blackberry, mulberry. Ripe fruit, but not jammy. It’s vivid, which is fourteen and a half percent doing its job on a north-west slope: full ripeness without cooking the fruit. At most there’s a touch of cherry sherbet, a whisper of the ester that goes full banana when Pinotage is pushed too far. Then cedar spice, sweet dried thyme, and a gentle baked-pie vanilla, the crust of a cherry pie rather than vanilla ice cream. That’s the oak talking, and the bigger barrel is exactly why it stays at pie-crust level instead of climbing into mocha.

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Palate: Impressively pure. Ripe black cherry first, then a hint of pepper. This is a Pinotage for people who love Cabernet, except brighter, because Pinotage has Pinot Noir in its blood. So alongside the plum and blackberry there’s a flicker of red-cherry acid, and a pH of 3.52 is exactly why that flicker is there. The tannins have guardrails: none of the crunchy rawness the new-wave style wears, and none of the gargantuan wall the big icon wines carry, because the wood here is doing structure rather than armour. The finish is superbly fresh and leaves your mouth watering, and the only defence against a watering mouth is another sip.

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TECHNICAL SPECS

Off the north-western face of the Bottelary Hills outside Stellenbosch, where the Steytlers have farmed since 1946 and Pinotage has been in the ground since around 1960. The hills face into the afternoon sun, which is why the tannins ripen so well here. Rooiland keeps the ripeness of the estate’s icon Steytler bottling but drops the makeup: matured in much larger barrels, most of them older, with a portion finished in concrete, so the fruit stays plush without the wood shouting over it.

Alc. 14.51% | Sugar 4.7 g/L | Acid 6.1 g/L | pH 3.52 |

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