Syrah 393

Delicious with a slow roasted pork belly and a match for some sweetness and spice too as it’s quite a bold, but fine wine.

A relatively easy growing season with moderate weather throughout, following a cold wet winter. An exceptionally warm early spring ensured a successful budburst and flowering with good even shoot growth. Above average rain at the end of October kept soil moisture optimum during the later hot summer. Gale force winds in January caused damage to some of our exposed mountainous vineyards, reducing yields a little. An excellent early harvest with full bodied, generous wines with intense, complex fruit flavours.

Time in barrel 20 months with only 2 gentle rackings. This wine was bottled unfined and unfiltered by hand.

Handpicking into 20 kg crates. Destemming and gentle crushing directly into small 2 ton open top fermentation tanks with 10% whole bunches. Spontaneous natural yeast fermentation @ max. 30°C with the cap of skins punched down manually 1 - 3 times a day for 14 days. 1/3 whole bunch fermented for 1 month in oak foudre. Wine drained directly to barrels together with single pressing from traditional basket press. Malolactic fermentation in the barrel. 30% new fine grained, slow toasted small French oak was used in the first year and old 700L oak in the second year.

A small family winery at the end of the Upper Blaauwklippen Road in the mountains above Stellenbosch South Africa. Established in 1992 by architect David Trafford & artist wife Rita with the focus on high end red wines of great intensity & longevity using minimal intervention production methods.