Wine Education1 November 20264 min read

Ten minutes with Lo & Behold Shiraz Mourvedre Carignan

By South African Wines

A slow first glass of the Piekenierskloof red blend, taken in the order you would taste it at the table, and what each step tells you about how the wine was made.

Ten minutes is enough to learn most of what is in a glass of Lo & Behold Shiraz Mourvedre Carignan, provided you take them in order. It is a Mourvèdre-led blend with Shiraz and Carignan, made by the Piekenierskloof Wine Company, and each of its grapes was made separately before blending. That means each stage of a slow first glass picks up a different part of the wine.

What follows is the order I would suggest if we were sitting across the table: air and temperature first, then the nose, then the palate, then a bite of food. None of it needs a notebook or any vocabulary beyond what you already use for cooking.

Before the clock starts

Give the wine twenty to thirty minutes in a decanter before you pour, and serve it at sixteen to eighteen degrees Celsius. A clean jug works if you have no decanter, because the aim is to spread the wine across a wide surface so the air reaches it. Count the decanting as separate from the ten minutes.

Sixteen to eighteen degrees is cooler than most centrally heated rooms. If the bottle has been standing in a warm kitchen, move it somewhere cool, such as an unheated hallway or a garage, for a quarter of an hour before decanting. A red served too warm smells mostly of alcohol, which would cover the pepper you are about to look for.

Use a generous red-wine glass and pour it about a third full. The empty space above the wine is where the aromas gather, and you need room to swirl without wearing it.

Minute one: look, then swirl

Hold the glass against a white napkin and look at the colour at the rim. This is a young wine, and its ageing notes say the fruit will soften into something more savoury over the coming years. A quick look now gives you a reference point if you keep a second bottle back and open it later.

Then swirl for a few seconds. Swirling pulls air through the wine and lifts aroma off the surface, and after a decant it is the last bit of air the wine gets before you smell it.

Minutes two to four: the nose

Put your nose well into the glass and look first for pepper. It comes from the Shiraz, which spent six months in French oak while going through malolactic fermentation, the natural conversion of sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid. The oak adds a little spice and rounds the Shiraz off, and the pepper comes through intact.

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Behind the pepper sits the fruit, which should smell bright and clean. The Mourvèdre and Carignan were fermented and aged in stainless steel for six months with no oak at all, so what you smell from those two grapes is their fruit as it came in. Take a second sniff after a short pause, since the first breath often registers only the strongest note.

That brightness starts in the vineyard. The bush vines are dry-farmed, meaning they live on rainfall alone, and grow at six hundred and fifty to seven hundred metres on sandy loam and sandstone. Cool mountain nights there slow the ripening down, which keeps aromatic lift in the grapes, and that lift is what you notice at the top of the glass.

Minutes five to seven: the first sip

Take a small sip and hold it for a moment before swallowing. Notice the fruit at the front of the mouth first. The same cool nights that hold the aromas also give Piekenierskloof reds their bright-edged fruit, and you should taste that edge straight away.

Then pay attention to the grip as you swallow. The drying feeling along the cheeks and the back of the tongue is tannin, part of what winemakers call structure. The ageing notes single out the structure of the Mourvèdre as the element that will mellow most with time, so this grip is the feature most likely to change if you keep a bottle.

Wait a minute and sip again. The wine has had a little more air by now, so check whether the pepper and the fruit seem to sit closer together on the second mouthful.

Minutes eight to ten: a bite of food

The quickest test is a slice of salami and a sliver of aged Manchego, the two halves of a simple charcuterie board. Eat the salami, then sip, and the salt and fat in the meat soften the tannin and push the fruit forward. Do the same with the Manchego, whose nutty, crumbly richness sits comfortably alongside the spice from the Shiraz.

For the meal that follows, I would choose grilled lamb cutlets with herby couscous. The charred fat on the cutlets suits the Mourvèdre's grip, and the herbs in the couscous pick up the pepper. For a meat-free table, a Mediterranean pasta with tomato, olives and capers is the better choice, since the brine from the olives and capers lines up with the bright edge of the fruit. The same method works on any of our South African red wines, and a blend is a good place to practise it because each grape leaves its own mark.

Opened now, Lo & Behold Shiraz Mourvedre Carignan shows its youthful pepper most clearly; left in the rack for a few more years, it is built to turn more savoury as the Mourvèdre's grip softens. On a cutlet night, start the decanter twenty minutes before the lamb goes under the grill.