11 Aug Extraño | Our Winner at Winemag Signature Red Blend 2017
On the 1st August 2017, the second annual Winemag Signature Red Blend Report Awards was held at Villa 47 in Cape Town, with our Fairview Extraño making us proud yet again, winning a 90 point rating by the judging panel. Fairview Winemaker Stephanie Wiid went along to receive the award with open arms.
For this year’s competition, 82 entries were received from 62 producers. These were tasted blind (labels out of sight) by the three-person panel consisting of Christian Eedes, Roland Peens and James Pietersen, scoring done according to the 100-point quality scale. The event called for wines which were “distinctive of their originators” and instead of the usual practice of dividing them into various sub-groups according to style, the judges tasted them as one continuous line-up – the thinking being that the fundamentals of wine appreciation such as complexity and balance should apply when it came to making quality assessments.
This new way of thinking is exactly in line with what Fairview’s Charles Back has always endeavoured to do – planting varieties best suited to our climate and soils – and we are so exalted to be reaping the results of those rather against-the-grain earlier decisions. Made up of a rather unusual Spanish blend of Tempranillo, Grenache and Carignan, our Extraño (meaning stranger in Spanish) is no doubt a bit of a surprise when compared to it’s more traditionally favoured counterparts of Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot. But Extraño has really come into its own this year, winning a spot in the Top 100 2017 competition, a bronze in the Wine Label Design Awards 2017 and now a 90 score for the Winemag Signature Red Blend Report. You shouldn’t mind talking to this stranger! Available online for R100. Buy here.
