Constantia (wine)
Constantia or Vin de Constance is a sweet dessert wine that has been produced intermittently on the Constantia wineries in the Cape region of South Africa since the 18th century . He became more than unreinforced not botrytisierter wine from late-harvested, partly rosinierten already on the vine grapes from different white and red muscat grapes with the admixture of small amounts of musts from Chenin Blanc , Muscat of Alexandria and in South Africa Pontac called teinturier you Teinturier Cher expanded . The wine from Constantia was one of the most famous sweet wines of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is said to have been the death drink of Napoleon , who imported considerable quantities to St. Helena every year . After an almost one hundred year break in production, caused by the phylloxera disaster and the general decline in demand for sweet wines, two Constantia sweet wines are produced again: the Vin de Constance from Gut Klein Constantia and the Grand Constance from Gut Groot Constantia .
Origin and characteristics
The Constantia estate, originally covering 750 hectares, was founded in 1685 by the governor Simon van der Stel . After van der Stel's death in 1712, the Constantia property was divided into three parts: Groot Constantia; Klein Constantia and Bergvliet, of which the latter no longer exists as a winery today. Hendrik Cloete acquired Groot Constantia in 1778, expanded the vineyards considerably and led the estate to a new period of prosperity, primarily through the production of sweet wines.
The wineries are located about 20 kilometers south of Cape Town city center, at the root of the Cape Peninsula . The vineyards extend on the steep eastern slopes of the Constantia Mountain, an extension of the Table Mountain. The wine-growing area is part of the Costal Region. Both wineries have a large portfolio of red and white wines, Groot Constantia also produces a fortified wine modeled on port wine. The vineyard area that Klein Constantia uses to obtain the grapes for the Vin de Constance is 7.5 hectares; no information is available for the Grand Constance.
In 1986 Klein Constantia began producing Vin de Constance. It is an unreinforced white wine made from yellow muscat grapes that have been dried on the vine, some of which have already been raisined and only harvested at the end of March. Botrytis does not play a role in the hard-skinned muscat grapes. After the very late harvest, the carefully destemmed grapes are mashed in open mash vats for up to five days before they are pressed. The alcoholic fermentation and first development of the wine takes place in steel tanks before it is drawn into 500 liter oak barrels to develop for at least another two years until the bottle is bottled. The Vin des Constance is light amber in color. Its alcohol content fluctuates between 13 and 14 percent by volume , depending on the vintage , at around 150–170 grams / liter of residual sugar and 6–8 grams / liter of acid .
After a few unsatisfactory attempts, the Groot Constantia winery came onto the market in 2003 with a sweet wine, which it called Grand Constance, since Klein Constantia had the rights to the original name. The production largely corresponds to that of Vin de Constance, but Groot Constantia also uses grapes from a reddish mutant of the Yellow Muscat, so that the product is a little darker amber with a slightly reddish touch. The two wines are also very similar in terms of alcohol content, residual sugar and acidity. The Grand Constantia has recently been bottled in bottles that are based on or even match the appearance of the original bottles, after broken fragments of a Constantia bottle were found in a shipwreck in the Delaware estuary in 2004 .
Both Constantia sweet wines are wines of exceptional quality; they are among the best of their kind in the world. The wines can be stored excellently, but the shelf life of each vintage has to be assessed differently. Good vintages of sweet wines from both wineries should, if properly stored, maintain their optimal drinking maturity for at least 15–20 years. Until the 1980s, Constantia wines from the mid-18th century were still traded at wine auctions . 2007 is considered an outstanding vintage, which was rated 97/100 by Robert Parker The Wine Advocate .
Others
From its beginnings in the second half of the 17th century to the end of the 19th century, Constantia mainly produced sweet wines and fortified wines in the style of port or sherry for the high demand at home and for export . On the one hand, this corresponded to the taste of a very wealthy group of buyers; on the other hand, only high-alcohol and sweet wines could be stored for a long time without loss of quality or exported to distant countries. In 1860 the Cobden Treaty came into force, which removed the preferential conditions for exports to the United Kingdom and made imports of comparable products from France much cheaper.In 1866 phylloxera reached South Africa and consumer tastes began to increasingly turn away from sweet wines, so that both Constantia- Goods struggled with severe economic problems and finally the production of the Constantia completely stopped at the end of the 19th century.
The Constantia was drunk at the royal courts of Europe and in the salons of the upper class and was considered a sign of refined taste. Correspondingly, the wine from Constantia occasionally appears in the literature of the 19th century as a synonym for exclusivity. Ludwig Tieck mentioned in the great Weinexkurs in his written before 1821 novella The paintings Cape wines with enthusuastischen words, and in the poem Sed non Satiata compares Baudelaire the promises his lover with Constantia wine, opium and wine from Nuits-Saint-Georges in the Burgundy wine region . Napoleon is the most famous connoisseur of Constantia wine. During his exile, considerable quantities of this wine were imported into St. Helena. However, it is unknown whether Napoleon valued this wine even before his exile; it could also have become his favorite wine because of its comparatively easy availability on St. Helena.
literature
- Steven Brook: Liquid Gold. Dessert Wines of the World Constable London 1987; Appendix I, ISBN 0094669201
- André Brink : Dessert wine in South Africa . Buren, 1974, ISBN 978-0-86963-018-1 . ;
- Jancis Robinson : The Oxford Wine Lexicon . Hallwag, Gräfe and Unzer, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-8338-0691-9 . ;
Individual evidence
- ↑ Groot Constantia - A winery in the middle of Cape Town . In: Focus , March 18, 2012. online at www.focus.de
- ↑ Constantia . on www.suedafrika-wein.de
- ↑ Vin de Constance 2006 . at www.kleinconstantia.com (English)
- ↑ Info from Spill ( Memento of the original from May 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . at www.spill.co.za (English), link no longer available
- ↑ Michael Broadbent : Broadbent's Wine Notes: Michael Broadbent describes and rates great wines and vintages from three centuries . Bern, Stuttgart 1994, p. 733, ISBN 3-444-10430-8
- ↑ Vin de Constance 2007 . at www.kleinconstantia.com (English)
- ↑ "How fills the mouth and palate and the whole sense [...] only a drop of the finest Cape wine". In: Ludwig Tieck: Works in four volumes . Edited by Marianne Thalmann. Munich 1963, vol. 3, p. 67
- ↑ Text and translations
