NY Times article on South African wines

James Lawther MW has two articles on South African wines in the June issue of Decanter I just received.

"Que Syrah,Syrah..." discusses South African Shiraz and suggests some to try.

"The best of South Africa Under (pounds)15" discusses 15 outstanding wines in the mentioned price range, both red and white. Information is given on where to obtain the mentioned wines in the UK in the stocklist section near the end of Decanter. Unfortunately no such information is given fo other countries including th US.

Hi Mike,

I'm a recent wine enthusiast (from South Africa), still learning about the region myself. For general comments on the cultivars, soils, climate, statistics, etc try:

Cheers, Lourens

In my opinion, one of the reasons for the growth in South African wine at the moment is the parallel growth of New World wine. Up until the early

90's, South African estates were producing predominantly Cabs to last 10-15 years and many were making a total mess of it. It was only a handful of estates (Neethlingshof, Nederberg, Boschendaal) who were successfully producing good long-lasting wines.

After the World started lifting sanctions on South Africa, we started getting a bigger influx of new world styled Australian and American wines that could be enjoyed the moment you walked out of the bottle store. However, they were a fair bit pricier than local wines. I think some of the wine producers woke up to this trend and began adopting this approach. It's taken them some years to adapt, but certainly on my last visit to SA (November), I was remarkably suprised by the level of improvement in many of these wines.

A good example of this is the massive growth of Shiraz. It was always my favourite style of grape and I often battled to find it, stores predominantly kept Cab, Merlot and Pinotage. If you walk into a South African (in South Africa) wine shop today, you will find that Shiraz is very prominant and, thankfully, Pinotage has taken a back-seat to this.