Verreaux Pinotage

Enjoy this wine with roast venison, grilled steak or duck dishes.

With an ideal Mediterranean microclimate, an abundance of soil diversity and water from the life-giving Breede River, the Alvi’s Drift vineyards are ideally positioned for producing remarkable wines of unique character and complexity. Our 2020 harvest will be remembered for not only yielding a larger-than-normal crop, but for nature’s gift of remarkable fruit that reached optimal ripeness. Sufficient cold units were accumulated during winter to break dormancy, rainfall was a little below average and spring brought the favourable conditions which contributed to earlier bud break on our vines. Moderate summer temperatures ensured optimal flavour retention in the grapes, resulting in a truly exceptional vintage.

After fermentation, the wine matures in a combination of new French and American oak barrels for 18 months.

To create this wine, crushed Pinotage grapes are transferred to our winery’s traditional, open top concrete fermentation tanks, built by our family patriarch almost a century ago. During fermentation, to increase skin-to-juice contact, the labour-intensive punch-down method (French: pigéage) is applied by hand, up to eight times daily. Juice is left to soak for a few days to extract optimum flavour and colour from the skins.

Alvi’s Drift is a third-generation, family-owned winery in South Africa’s Breede River Valley. Named after the bridge connecting the farm, our 410-hectare estate lies in the cool-climate Scherpenheuvel ward, where diverse soils shape our award-winning wines. From crisp whites to elegant reds, MCCs, and sparkling wines, each bottle reflects a love for craft and terroir. Led by winemaker Alvi van der Merwe, we blend tradition with innovation—doing more than expected, because we’re doing what we love.