I did not watch the game this morning, but getting this message from Adi still made me cringe/smile.

Says Adi: “The springboks score today looked like my last CWG rating from Miguel Chan! The review reads like the match report  – bitter, unstable in the set-phases, flat on defence, lean on attack, no style, scoreline flattering.”

Here is Chan’s review of the 2013 vintage of the Geel Kapel.

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Sweet (actually a dry wine)

Since I was tasting the line up blind, it was obvious this advance color offering with it’s hazy and cloudy gold hue was an unstable and not clean wine.

Oxidative, stemmy with beer yeast note, kind of IPA style craft beer, notes of orange peel, floral, rose buds, musk, high alcohol evident, lean, yeasty and nutty on texture, tannic, phenolic, flat, individual style, this is a highly controversial wine, IMHO, not worthy being on the auction, considering the very high standards of sound winemaking that have generally prevails over the last 3 decades.

By offering a wine like this the CWG have potentially open a back door, for possible mediocrity in the future!  Simply put, cloudy and unstable wine, does not have it’s place at that level of precision.

I have looked at every possible angle, I just can’t place this wine anywhere, there is simply no benchmark anywhere in the world that it can relate to.

I am all for naturalness in wine, more especially from a viticultural perspective but when one is paying an average price of R 352 per bottle over the last 11 years, this is a gamble, not worthy of investing in!

This kind of offering is dangerous and does not do justice to Swartland as a region, guys have to be careful, not to cast doubt in consumer’s mind.

360 bottles produced | 59 / 79 Points MC

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The Boks lost to the All Blacks by 57 points to 0 in The Rugby Championship…

Recent reviews of Adi’s entry for this year’s Guild Auction and his collaboration with Duncan Savage on their Loveboat wines, suggests he has improved much over the years, and maybe there is hope for die bokke too… maybe.