100 years of Pinotage, the grape that was almost lost
By Jamie Goode | 21st October 2025
Few grapes are as divisive as Pinotage, the red grape that is uniquely South African. One of South Africa’s most famous winemakers once went on record as saying ‘don’t steal, rape or murder, or make Pinotage.’ I won’t name him here, but his comments were met with deep annoyance on the part of many, but also were celebrated by a few.
What’s the challenge of Pinotage? Viticulturally, this is a tricky grape in that while it yields well, it often displays uneven ripeness. For white wines, this isn’t so much of a problem, but for reds, having unripe green-tasting grapes in the same vat as over-ripe, jammy grapes isn’t ideal for making high quality wines. Of course, you’ll never get all your grapes at the same exact stage of ripeness: this isn’t possible, because there’s variation in ripeness even within a single bunch. But it’s about getting balance. Green flavours with jammy flavours aren’t so nice, so some work needs to be done in the vineyard to get the grapes as even as can be.
Another issue with Pinotage is that its talent doesn’t lie in making big, dark red wines, and there was a period in the late 1990s and early 2000s where this is what everyone seemed to want. Pinotage was forced into a slipper that didn’t fit. Now the market accepts what this grape makes best: supple red wines, tending to elegance, with lighter, more expressive flavours, more red fruit than black.
Handled badly in both vineyard and winery Pinotage has wrestled with a reputation of making wines with a certain flavour – one that not everyone finds agreeable. Bad Pinotage often has a distinctive sweet and sour character, often with some bitterness.
Of late, though, its reputation has improved quite a bit, and a lot of the credit goes to one producer in particular, Kanonkop. They’ve taken it seriously for decades, and the Kanonkop Pinotage is a banker for cellaring. Long time winemaker, Beyers Truter, became known as Mr Pinotage. His replacement Abrie Beeslaar came to Kanonkop as an understudy to Truter in 2002, and took over in 2003 – and maintained the focus. A big step was when he began making an ‘icon’ level Pinotage, the Black Label, in 2006. Abrie has left to focus on his own Pinotage-driven project, but the point has now been proven: Pinotage can be serious.
Some history. As far as grape varieties go, this is a new one, dating back to 1924 when Professor Itzak Perold took pollen from Pinot Noir and flowers of Cinsault and made a cross. In 1925 the first seeds were taken from this crossing. But this new variety almost didn't make it. For some unknown reason Perold didn’t plant the seeds in a vine nursery or conservatory, but instead planted them in his residence garden at the Univeristy. Two years later he left to work with the KWV, leaving the vines growing in his now untended garden. This new crossing was saved by a young lecturer Dr Charlie Niehaus when Perold's garden was cleared up, and the four plants were replanted in the nursery at Elsenburg Agricultural College by Prof CJ Theron, who later showed the vines, which he had grafted, to Perold. This was when the name Pinotage was coined (for Pinot Noir x Hermitage, the name used for Cinsault at the time), and gradually people began to plant it and make wines from it.
The first experimental Pinotage wines were made in 1941, and the 1953 first commercial plantings went into the ground at Kanonkop, and these vines are the ones that the Black Label is made from. 1959 the first commercial Pinotage was bottled under the Lanzerac label. The rest is history, and the variety became widely adopted largely because it was easy to produce good crops, and it seemed well adjusted to the local climate.
We’ve already discussed the challenges in the vineyard that must be overcome if good wines are to be made from Pinotage. But it also turns out to be tricky to handle in the winery. Abrie Beeslar thinks this is the case. ‘We came out of isolation in the 1990s and we had our own style. The old guys added two cans of acid for this variety and one can of acid for that variety. For Pinotage you can’t do that.’
Abrie explained that Pinotage is the variety that has the highest pH (and therefore low acidity), and the highest malic acid (which is the green-tasting appley acid that is converted to the softer lactic acid in a second fermentation called malolactic fermentation). Pinotage matures fast and veraison (when the grapes change from green to red) to picking is just four weeks. It also ferments fast and a typical fermentation would be just four days, as opposed to a normal red wine fermentation that will take around 7-10 days. This fast fermentation gives temperature spikes, especially in the caps, and this can cause extraction of the wrong things from the skins. One of the off flavours in Pinotage is a bitter-tasting compound called acrolein, caused by bacterial activity in the high pH wines as they develop. ‘There are a lot of things that can go wrong with this variety, and lots of these things weren’t understood in the 1990s,’ says Abrie.
Because of these challenges, Kanonkop devised a special way of working with Pinotage. They make the wines in an old way in shallow fermentation vessels called lagares, punching down by hand at regular intervals. They want to do a lot of extraction before there’s much alcohol present, and with a fast fermenter like Pinotage you have to be careful after a few days. ‘You have to extract what you need and then separate the skins from the juice,’ says Abrie. The temperature of the cap never goes more than 2 degrees above the juice. In larger ferments you have cap temperatures of 35 C, which is very extractive. The open tops are shallow so it loses about 0.5% alcohol, and the wine doesn’t get reductive: oxygen gets in easily to stabilize the wine.’
This all sounds quite technical, but it seems unfair to blame a grape variety for problems that come from not understanding how to handle it best.
These days, it’s quite rare to find a difficult, grunty Pinotage with no charm. There’s an increased understanding of how to work with this variety, and also where its talents lie stylistically. And customers love it: most wineries working with Pinotage says it’s one of the easiest wines to sell, with a loyal following. The ugly duckling is turning into quite a swan!