Seasonal30 October 20264 min read

Spice Route Chakalaka and the first stews of October

By South African Wines

A Swartland red blend for the month the heating goes back on: what to cook with it, and how to serve it in a warm British house.

Spice Route Chakalaka is a red blend from the Swartland with generous, spice-laden fruit and firm tannins, and in Britain it belongs to October. By now the heating has gone on and dinner has moved to dishes that spend the afternoon in the oven.

The pairings Spice Route suggests for it read like a list of what British kitchens start cooking this month: oxtail stew, sticky ribs, sausages in the pan. The notes below cover how to fit the wine into the weeks between the end of the warm weather and the start of winter cooking.

A hot-country red for a wet month

The Swartland sits north of Cape Town around Malmesbury, with hot, dry summers cooled by breezes off the Atlantic. Spice Route works almost entirely with dry-farmed bush vines, meaning free-standing vines with no trellis and no irrigation, so the roots push deep into iron-rich red clay and decomposed granite looking for water. The berries come in small and thick-skinned, which shows in the glass as concentration and grip.

The clay holds enough moisture to carry the vines through summer, and the granite keeps the wine fresh. The result is a concentrated red that still feels light in the mouth, which is what a slow-cooked dinner asks for. A stew with a thick, glossy sauce needs enough tannin to stand up to it and enough freshness that the second glass goes down as easily as the first.

In the cellar, the grapes ferment in open-top concrete tanks, called kuipe in South Africa, with the skins punched down by hand to draw out colour and gentle tannin. That gentle extraction is why the tannins stay firm but smooth alongside food.

Oxtail for the Sunday the clocks go back

The last Sunday of October hands everyone an extra hour, and oxtail stew is a good way to spend it. Brown the oxtail, add red wine with carrots and parsnips, now at their best in the shops, and leave it low in the oven until the meat slides off the bone.

The sauce turns thick and sticky with gelatine from the bone. Chakalaka's structured tannins give that richness some grip, and its spice sits comfortably beside the bay leaves and black pepper in the pot. Keep a different red for the cooking and save the Chakalaka for the table, where its fruit is still intact.

Ribs and boerewors under the grill

More from the Journal

A table set outdoors under a vine-shaded pergola, the Cape

Seasonal

Outdoor cooking is mostly over by now, but the flavours that suit this wine work indoors. Sticky pork ribs with a smoked paprika rub can be roasted low and finished under a hot grill, and the smoke and sweet glaze sit well against the wine's ripe fruit.

Boerewors, the coiled South African farm sausage, cooks well in a griddle pan when the garden is too wet for charcoal. For South Africans in Britain, a rainy half-term Saturday with boerewors and lamb chops in the pan and a bottle of Swartland red on the table is a fair stand-in for a braai, the South African barbecue. It is also an easy first bottle for anyone new to Cape red blends.

Serving it with the heating on

Chakalaka is best served at sixteen to eighteen degrees, which is cooler than most British living rooms once the radiators are running. A bottle left on the worktop beside the oven will come to the table too warm, and the alcohol and oak will push ahead of the fruit.

Keep it somewhere cool, such as a hallway or the cupboard under the stairs, or give it fifteen minutes in the fridge before it goes anywhere near a glass. Each variety spends time separately in seasoned French and American barrels before blending, then the finished wine goes back into the same used barrels to settle. Served a touch cool, that oak reads as structure around the fruit.

A bottle to keep for a later winter

Chakalaka drinks well on release, and it has the structure for many more years in the rack. With time the bright fruit turns savoury, towards leather, dried herbs and tobacco, and the tannins soften to velvet.

The tobacco has a history on this farm. Spice Route began on Klein Amoskuil, an old tobacco farm near Malmesbury that Charles Back bought in the late nineties, and the first wines were made in a cellar converted from its tobacco-drying shed. Blending six varieties evens out the differences between harvests, so the wine arrives with the same character each year, and Platter's Wine Guide has given it a five-star rating across multiple vintages.

A young bottle of Spice Route Chakalaka wants an hour in a decanter to soften its tannins, so pour it out as the oxtail comes out of the oven to rest. By the time the mash is beaten and the plates are warm, it will be ready.