Blank Bottle Mixed Case

The 2019 vintage Grenache was a little bit lighter than usual. I had in barrel some 2018 and a little bit of that made the Grenade component a little bit plusher and when you mix different vintages the wine needs to be labelled as a non-vintage. The Grenache fermented whole clusters in an open top fermentation vessel.

The 2018 component is from a trellised vineyard in Wellington where the 2019 is from a bush Vine Organically Certified Wellington Vineyard.

Fermented in open-top fermenters.

Aged in old French oak barrels for 18 months

100% Pinotage from Darling. The vineyard have since been removed so this will be the last vintage of the 40 year old bush-vines planted in decomposed Granite

Marsanne, Roussanne, Grenache blanc, Grenache Gris, Viognier and Verdelho from Paarl, Stellenbosch, Swartland In the olden days, before our borders were opened for regular business, some of our leading winemakers at the time travelled to wine producing areas they admired. They mostly focused on areas with similar climatical/growing conditions to ours. Whenever they stumbled upon great wines made from varietals not grown in South Africa, they would try and get their hands on some clean plant material and (being of the less patient/more dynamic type) simply smuggled these vines into the country. In the 2020 harvest we picked 120 tons from about 70 vineyards; 35 different varietals – anything from Fernao Pirez to Cabernet. This year we bottled well over 40 different wines.

I have access to a really nice block of Viognier on the slopes of the Helderberg mountain facing Stellenbosch. I have been making wine from that block since 2012, but,up until today, have only used it in blends. So I decided to do an experiment. We picked the vineyard in two sections. The first picking on a relatively low sugar and a second picking as a ripe component.

A combination of the two were aged for 2 years in old small barrel French Oak - 50% of the final blend. The other 50% was an early picking of the same vineyard the following year. In other words; the final wine is 50% early picking that spent one year in barrel (2018 vintage) and the other 50% a combination of early and late picking aged 2 years in barrel (2017 vintage).

Verdelho from 2 different vineyards, Palomino, Weisser Riesling, Semillon, Sauvignon blanc, Marsanne, Roussanne, Chenin blanc from 3 different vineyards, Chardonnay and Viognier