Stoneboat Pinotage 2007 is a surprise find in my cellar

Photo:Lanny Martiniuk

Stoneboat Vineyards and its Pinotage wines were included in my 2017 book, Icon: Flagship Wines from British Columbia’s Best Wineries. The objective of the book was to identify wines that, in my view, were worth putting into the wine cellar to age. I considered Stoneboat’s Pinot Noir but I had already included a number of Pinot Noirs in the book. At the time, there were only three or four Pinotage producers in British Columbia. Lake Breeze Vineyards was already in the book with a Bordeaux blend and The View Winery & Vineyard, now the largest Pinotage producer, was then still finding its feet. So I chose Stoneboat to represent this red varietal which is not well known outside its birth place of South Africa. Recently, I stumbled across a bottle of Stoneboat Pinotage 2007 in my cellar, covered with dust and a few other bottles of older wine. In Icon, I had quoted another critic who wrote that this vintage was mature. I opened my 16-year-old bottle with some apprehension and got a big surprise: the wine was delicious, with a core of bright cassis and blueberry flavours on the palate. It makes me wish I had cellared more vintages of Stoneboat Pinotage. The current vintage is the 2021 and is available for $32 a bottle.

Here is an excerpt from Icon. (The book is still in print and, in my opinion, is the best of the 20 wine books I have written. Gorgeous photography by Christopher Stenberg strengthened the book.)

The Pinotage grape was developed in South Africa in 1925 when a professor of viticulture at Stellenbosch University, Abraham Perold, pollinated Pinot Noir with a Rhône variety, Cinsault. After the first commercial planting in 1943, it was planted modestly and now comprises just six percent of South Africa’s vineyards. However, the variety has an international following. Peter F. May, a British wine writer and an honorary member of the producers’ Pinotage Association, runs a web-based fan club, The Pinotage Club. The vine was brought to the Okanagan in 1995 by a South African immigrant, Paul Moser, who established Lake Breeze Vineyards. He bought a limited number of Pinotage vines from the University of California (South African vines were not allowed into Canada because of virus concerns). Paul asked Lanny Martiniuk, an Oliver vine propagator, to multiply them. Lanny was impressed with the vines and propagated some that he planted, beginning in 1998, in one of his own vineyards. Five years later, he expanded the planting to another of the Martiniuk family vineyards. Today, the Stoneboat Pinotage blocks total 3.23 hectares (8 acres) and are the largest planting in the South Okanagan. [The View’s Pinotage block in East Kelowna is now larger.]

“Though it originated in South Africa,” the Stoneboat winery commented when releasing the 2012 vintage, “we have found over the past 15 years that Pinotage on the Black Sage Gravelbar expresses itself differently from its counterpart abroad. Usually last to be harvested, in late October. Pinotage never fails to deliver intense, exotically flavoured wines.” “Pinotage is great to work with in the cellar,” said Alison Moyes, Stoneboat’s winemaker until 2015. “It is the complete opposite of Pinot Noir in how we treat it. With Pinot, everything is gentle, with lower temperature fermentation. Pinotage is a bigger animal. I am trying to get more extraction so it ferments with more heat. I don’t extract a lot of unpleasant characters in doing that. Pinotage is not overly prone to bitterness and astringency.”

The winemaking is straightforward. The grapes, after a five-day cold soak, are fermented in small stainless-steel tanks, followed by a short maceration. Then the wine is transferred to oak. The first vintage, in 2005, had just 10 months in barrel. Subsequently, the winery has concluded that the variety needs at least 13 months in barrel “to restrain the variety’s flamboyant wild berry characters and bring forth its rich, plummy undertones.”

The 2021 Pinotage, which had 15 months aging in American and French oak, was made by Stoneboat’s current winemaker, William Adams, who took over when Alison Moyes moved on. Lanny Martiniuk and his family sold the winery in June 2021 to Kyla Richey and Rudy Verhoeff who have kept Pinotage in the portfolio. It is there almost by chance. Lanny had begun propagating vines in 1983 in his nursery near Oliver. Lake Breeze’s Paul Moser asked Lanny to propagate some Pinotage vines. Intrigued by a varietal then unfamiliar to him, Lanny kept one cutting for himself.

“I had it in a pot for a couple of years,” Lanny told me in a 2005 interview. “I liked the cluster. And it has a very tough skin, very upright growth characteristics and very strong. So I said, I have got to try this. By then, Paul had sold and Lake Breeze’s new owners did not want to release any wood. I took my one plant and had it tissue-cultured. I think we got about 500 plants.” He was impressed with the wines that could be made from the grape. “I am not a Meritage type drinker,” Lanny told me. “I really like Pinot Noirs. The Pinotage was attractive to me because it is like a really full-bodied, heavy Pinot Noir.” That might well describe the 2007 Pinotage that was almost lost in my cellar.