Kanonkop Black Label: Seminal and Great

True greatness is felt, not measured. No critic or judge in his or her right mind would allocate stars, scores, or points to Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture, nor to the film On the Waterfront, not to mention the perfection of Steely Dan’s seminal track “Kid Charlemagne”.

This is a stark reality, and when experiencing a wine such as the latest release of Kanonkop’s Black Label Pinotage – namely the 2023 vintage – I am disturbingly reminded of what a silly bunch we wine professionals have become, having the audacity to appraise magnificent, ethereal wines such as these with impersonal, cold-hearted numerical figures or stars.

Although this wine, made at Kanonkop since the 2006 vintage, is firmly categorised as originating from the Pinotage grape, this corrals it into the suffocatingly limiting borders of classification and the expectation that comes with this identification. Forget about the variety, or even the place, for that matter, for Kanonkop Black is first and foremost a magnificent red wine that happens to be a Pinotage from Stellenbosch. This is what a transcendental wine should be, and this is what Kanonkop Black Label is, and what it has become known and admired for. Hence, many gladly fork out close to R3 000 a bottle for the honour and privilege of the experience it provides.

Details? Well, the wine originates from a vineyard planted in 1953, upon the instruction of Paul Sauer, who owned Kanonkop from 1929 until his death in 1976. Sauer believed in Pinotage long before the variety had acquired any semblance of commercial value. Perhaps the fact that Sauer was taught about grapes and land and farming by Prof Abraham Izak Perold, the founder of Pinotage, had something to do with this.

This vineyard was thus 70 years old when harvesting for the 2023 Black Label commenced – and the vintage is deemed to have been “extraordinary”.

A relatively dry winter and mild, dry spring provided ideal conditions for flowering and fruit set, with minimal disease pressure. The regular south-easterly winds helped keep the canopies healthy. However, the season’s trajectory shifted dramatically in December when more than 100 mm of rain fell – an unusually wet month that prompted a reassessment of harvest expectations.

January delivered cool, consistent ripening weather, setting the stage for a timely start to picking.

Of course, the Black Label Pinotage is made according to traditional Kanonkop winemaking methods: open concrete fermenters; skins manually punched through the fermenting juice every two hours; the wine drawn off after three and a half days. After malolactic fermentation, the wine was aged in new French oak 225-litre barrels for 18 months.

Yes, it is a classic wine, and being from a 2023 vintage can quite rightly be considered young. Yet youth is such a fine time to express greatness. Here and now, when exuberance, prescience, and hope lie over the wine like sparkling pearl shards, and its heart beats with vigour and pulse.

The nose has a lot going on: a wet, tangible cloud of scents that recall wilderness, red-fruited morsels, and tilled stony soil – the tough kind that gives plough-horses shin splints. It is heady, and it is perfumed, and it is dizzily intoxicating in a way that makes one feel wanton and deeply happy, the kind of feeling that has you making plans you had not expected to make.

One has to drink deep, for this wanton feeling requires it. The wine is taken in a draught because you have seen it, you have smelt it, and now you want it all – and as Mr Gekko said in the film Wall Street, “greed is good”.

What I find in the Black Label 2023 – and I have had all the vintages – is that this wine exudes luxury and grace and style the way Kate Winslet conveys shapely eroticism: a scent of Chanel No. 5 and the kind of alluring, illicit smile that would make a Bellville dominee break an NG church window with his inherited sixth-generation family Bible.

On the palate and all the way to the finish, the wine has a palpable plushness, a densely woven yet featherlight silk frond bearing flavour, brightness, and distinctive aura. Tannins are finely knotted and meticulously strung, but not to a nervy, edgy tightness. Flavours are restrained yet resounding in their measured tones: black cherries stored at room temperature to draw out sugar that runs alongside acidity; fig paste folded onto a warm slate slab in a Moroccan market veiled in the early morning Mediterranean mist; warm tar and mulberry compote.

Deeper, there is something fleshy and savoury in the wine. Take a large slab of sirloin, salt it well, and place it in a cooler for three days. From the flesh emerges a liquid, slightly unctuous – salt and iron with a smattering of blood. This, too, finds its way into Kanonkop Black Label 2023, a wine that needs no exterior defining, because it – always – defines itself.