September 26, 2003
By Jean-Pierre Rossouw
Right now, I have four bottles of bubbly in my fridge. Two of them are fine champagnes - a Billecart-Salmon rosé because of a birthday and a dinky of Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin, which I won by placing a fortuitous third at the petanque competition of Franschhoek's Bastille Day festival.
If my team's petanque skills had been better, I would have a magnum of Veuve in the fridge, so I harbour a grudge...
Another of the bottles is one of the new bubblies made by the house of JC Le Roux - the Scintilla. Then there is a bottle of bubbly that has no label, an in-house experimental sparkling wine.
I also have a few bottles of my other local favourite producers, Graham Beck and Villiera.
This tally is higher than usual, but I do believe that any self-respecting fridge should always have at least one bottle of bubbly inside it. It keeps the potential for celebration alive.
It doesn't need to be champagne with the quality of cap
classique that we have on hand, but it should ideally not be carbonated bubbly unless you plan to make cocktails.
My preference for bottle-fermented sparkling is not about snobbishness; they simply have an incredible amount more of the yeastiness and complexity that this form of wine embodies. Anyway, it's wine, not a carbonated pop drink.
With the fuss about corks versus screw caps still to reach its zenith, a thought does cross the mind: what kind of celebration is it without the liberating pop of a mushroom cork?
First the anticipation as you loosen that cage, mixed with a mild concern that you are going to shatter some glassware or bruise a friend, then comes the massive release of a few atmospheres of pressure as the genie trapped inside the bottle escapes
.
This is the drama of ritual, even before you get going on all the stuff about how good bubbly can make you feel and how the bubbles contain positive ions to uplift the jaded spirit, etc, etc.
Perhaps it is because bubbly is so often enjoyed when the party light is on that it is under-appreciated as a wine. Making wine is labour-intensive, making cap classique is doubly so, because you make white wine (the base wine) and then you make bubbly through the second fermentation.
The blending of the base wines requires one of the essential and undersung skills of a winemaker.
We have great bubblies at great prices. The recent awards ceremony for the Amorim Wine Magazine Cap Classique Challenge refers.
The winner was the accomplished Weltevrede Brut 1999 in a tight race against seven other four-star wines, five of them from the Robertson area, with Graham Beck a major presence. And almost all the four-star wines were in the R50-R60 range.
  
 
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