2013 Mulderbosch Vineyards Mulderbosch Faithful Hound 750 ml

The Hound finds a Truffle

Every day we come in to the office, we’re tasting here at WineAccess HQ. It’s a constant parade of wines of all stripes, shapes, and sizes. Any Monday morning we’re not on the road, we arrive to find a tower of big brown UPS boxes stacked up high and waiting for us. Last week, we started with about 70 samples to taste before lunchtime. We love what we do, but it’s no secret that we have to wade through a lot of muck to find wines we feel are worth your time. Our acceptance rate is around 5% — about the same as Stanford’s.

Out of the 70 wines we tasted on Monday, just three made the cut. The 67 wines we rejected inspired us to scribble a list of flaws long enough to wallpaper your apartment; our tasting notes from the last 10 years are filled with weekly barrages of withering criticism. It’s rare that a wine gets universal approval and is rushed to the front of the queue; rarer still that it’s made by the former winemaker at Screaming Eagle and praised by Steve Tanzer as one of the best new wines of South Africa, with a 91+ point cherry on top; and rarest of all, that it’s just $16! If you’re looking for a house wine that punches way above its weight-class, and that you won’t feel guilty about opening, look no further.

Since its inception in 1989, Mulderbosch has been setting the pace for South Africa’s elite wine producers. The first vineyard co-founders Larry Jacobs and Mike Dobrovic purchased was a revelation: gently sloped with perfect sun exposure and a base of clay and limestone, perfect for Bordeaux varieties. The warmest parcels were planted with Cabernet, Petit Verdot, and Malbec. The cooler parcels with the highest concentration of limestone were planted with Cabernet Franc and Merlot. The idea was to create a signature Bordeaux-styled wine that would be Old World in its structure and New World in its fruit. Something unique to South Africa. Something to put it on the map.

After the first few trials of blending, the boys knew they had a hit on their hands. All five grapes blended together gorgeously, like the New York Philharmonic building toward a crescendo. The bass notes of black fruit and tobacco-like tannic structure were the Cabernet, Merlot, and Malbec. The high-toned notes of black pepper, cedar spice, and black olive came from the Cab Franc and Petit Verdot. The wine was superb — all that was left for them to do was to give the wine a name.

For the first year after Jacobs and Dobrovic bought the estate, they noticed a dog sitting at the house of the recently deceased owner, waiting for him to return. It was a reddish-brown mutt that answered to the name “Boes.” Every day, that dog would sit through the heat of summer and cold of winter, waiting for his master to return. Dobric’s mother took care of Boes, who over time came to follow the new owners around the vineyards all day, until he died in 1990. The undying loyalty of Boes inspired the name of Mulderbosch’s signature Bordeaux blend: The Faithful Hound.

Today, this Faithful Hound has a new master: consulting winemaker Andy Erickson, the 100-point winemaker with the unmatched resume — with clients named Screaming Eagle, Arietta, Dalle Valle, Dancing Hares, Harlan/BOND, Ovid, Saintsbury, Spottswoode, Staglin, and Hartwell. Erickson signs off on every blend, and we could taste that level of expertise as we separated the wheat from the chaff littering WineAccess HQ.

The 2013 Mulderbosch Faithful Hound stopped us in our tracks. It’s a classy Cabernet-based wine brimming with pedigree. Tanzer — the stingiest critic in the business — gave this “classy juice” 91+ points. This is a perfect house wine that tastes like $40 but costs $16. Buy it by the caseload … while it lasts.