MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Discovery over Jordan’s cool vineyards has injected serious fizz into its wines

Very few wine producers are disarmingly honest about where they’ve come from, and where they’re heading. This is partly because wine has a longer shelf life than most products, so to mention that you handled a particular vintage in a way you wouldn’t repeat today may be to condemn whatever bottles are about to the ignominy of dismissive consumption. It doesn’t always matter that much: if the “mistake” relates to a long-forgotten vintage, you get credit for the honesty without much of a downside.

Gary Jordan, of Jordan in Stellenbosch, was even more disarmingly honest as he addressed an audience in Johannesburg recently. With his wife Kathy, they have been responsible for everything produced at Jordan since the cellar was built in the early 1990s — no ancestors to blame, but with the learning curve of 25 years evident to all.

I had always thought that the earlier Jordan vintages were never quite ripe enough — and I had assumed that this was his preferred style. Nor had I any idea — until this presentation — why things changed: it’s a brave and honest producer who admits to misreading the potential of his own vineyards.

While vineyard management and harvest decisions can be more marked with red wines, it takes longer to become manifest because of the maturation cycle. Jordan’s confession about his discovery of how cool his vineyards actually are provided the perfect explanation to why I hadn’t really been attracted to the reds until about five years ago.

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