Tuesday, April 11, 2017

A wine tasting with Hermann Kirschbaum at Buitenverwachting

Last Wednesday saw us visiting Buitenverwachting in Constantia with our wine club. It is one of our favourite farms, producing superb wine. It has a very good restaurant run by chef Edgar Osojnik, a successful coffee & deli shop, a family of owls in the oaks and the new tasting room ....
... which is in the old cellar on the side of the large lawn
Previous Cellarmaster Hermann Kirschbaum, who has been with Buitenverwachting since 1993, has been promoted to Farm Manager. Wine maker (for the last 13 years) Brad Paton has now taken over as Cellarmaster. He will be appointing a new winemaker shortly. Here is Herman with his wife Adrienne who organised the platters we enjoyed after the tasting
Inside the spacious new tasting room, we made ourselves comfortable on the long sofas
Modernity fits well into the old building's core
There are lots of different seating options
We began with the Buitenverwachting MCC Brut, often sold out, bright and crisp with some pinot raspberry showing. A great way to start the evening with experienced winemaker Hermann
Baby vines above the bar. We began with the whites and tasted Buiten Blanc. This amazingly popular wine sells over 600,000 bottles a year and is on most wine lists in South Africa. Tasting it, you can understand why and it sells for only R60 a bottle on the farm. One of our favourites, the Hussey’s Vlei Sauvignon blanc, is clean, crisp and lively, with good green Constantia flavours. The well wooded 2014 Maximus Blanc Fumé is complex and elegant, well integrated with the vanilla wood and built to last. R250 a bottle. We are so glad to see a revival in wooded Sauvignon Blancs, it does add so much finesse and character to these lovely wines
The Oenophiles, earnestly tasting, scoring and making notes. Buitenverwachting is keen to host wine clubs
A line up of some of the wines we tasted. We had four reds, starting with the Meifort, a Bordeaux blend, which always sold extremely well in our shop. It is made from the same barrels of wine that the flagship wine Christine is selected from and therefore gives very good value for money at R90 a bottle on the farm. The Christine is in a class all of its own however, showing such intensity with expensive wood and herbs on the nose, soft, supple and warm; a lovely cassis blockbuster, R350 on the farm. We loved the Malbec with its savoury beetroot and pomegranate wildness, soft and supple and sappig with cherry sweetie and soy flavours, gentle tannins and a vanilla ending. R250 on the farm. The Merlot is full of rich dark cherries, tobacco dust, some mint and long after tastes, R160
Adrienne had organised platters for us for afterwards. Good bread, some cheese and curried meatballs, two dips, olives feta and sundried tomatoes, biltong, spicy chorizo and some grapes. What a great evening, thank you Herman and Adrienne, we had great wine and food and great fun with you both

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