Last September, I tried this wine and found it most enjoyable if a bit aromatically gentler than the style of Pinotage I typically like. My notes from then could very well be reproduced today, as I opened my second bottle of this same vintage.
$18.95 at Vintages.
14.5% alc./vol. Again, very deep saturation; mulberry-garnet hue; translucent at the core. Aromatically quiet, classic Pinotage aromas - smoked meat, leather, a bit of banana and stawberry; spicy oak in reasonable measure. Firm and tight on the palate; tough and grippy, warm and even a bit sweetish. Lots of alcoholic warmth. Very tannic and well structured again, with hints of Lapsang-Souchong-tea on the mid-palate and oak spice on the finish.
I suppose it could be said that for what the Môreson lacks in old-style leathery bitterness (no bitterness here at all) it makes up with high ripeness and a big, all-encompassing forward structure. I particularly like the grainy tannins, though I do wish that they had veered into the bitter-black-table-grape mode, as so many Pinotages in the '90s still did (mid-'90s Zonnebloems being no exception, but rather the rule!).
On another point, I do wish that the alcohol levels would drop back down to the 12-13% level. Part of my lament about the forced clean-up of Pinotage for the finicky international market has had to do with this trend toward über-ripeness - something that wasn't the case when I started drinking Pinotage. In the late '90s, many still had a comfortable 12.5% alc./vol. level, albeit with much in the way of estery/bandaidy/bitter flavours - I loved these, so where I'm concerned it's quite pointless (pun intended) to mark down (pun intended) that old style of Pinotage in an absolute sense.
As I've pontificated on numerous occasions in the past, I've no problems with there being a cleaned up, modern style of Pinotage; I just wish that the cherished classic old style would still be fairly represented for the benefit of those of us who love it and never wished for its displacement from wine shelves.