Fleurfontein

Serve with mascarpone, pear & fig tart or cheese platter for dessert.

The KEERMONT FLEURFONTEIN (‘flower fountain’) derives its name from a beautiful spring on the farm. The Sauvignon blanc vineyard from which grapes are sourced for this wine lies just below this spring. We use a distinctive technique to produce raisins in the vineyard which give the Fleurfontein its sweetness. 2022 will go down as a very successful and plentiful vintage at Keermont. On paper it was a vintage of two halves. The first half of the season was very cool and wet. We recorded the wettest winter since starting to farm Keermont Vineyards in 2005! These conditions led to good growth in the early season, but also increased disease pressure. We had to work hard to keep up with the strong growth in order to keep all the vines trimmed and tucked in to ripen the crop ideally. By Christmas time we could see that we had a lovely looking crop of grapes ripening on the healthy green vines. After Christmas the weather changed completely and we had a hot and dry run into harvest. The grapes, which we thought were going to be harvested late, ripened quickly under healthy conditions. Harvest started on 1 February which is normal for us. The vineyards consistently delivered good yields and the winery tanks filled up quickly. We pressed our biggest vintage ever in the Keermont Winery: just over 90 tonnes of healthy, estate grown fruit!

The grape syrup is slowly fermented by indigenous yeast in Hungarian and French oak barrels and then matured in these barrels for about 18 months.

Raisins are produced by using a pair of pliers to pinch the stem of the bunches, while they ripen on the vine. This pinching action stops the translocation of fluids into and out of the grapes, which then stops them from becoming over ripe. We do this when the grapes are at optimal ripeness in order to concentrate the juice with the perfect sugar to acid balance. The grapes dry out naturally during the warm summer and are harvested a few weeks later. The syrupy juice is squeezed from them with a hard pressing process.

Agriculture in the Upper Blaauwklippen Valley can be traced back to 1694. In 2003 the Wraith family moved to the Western Cape from Gauteng and bought two adjacent farms. These two farms are now farmed as one Estate known as Keermont Vineyards. 2005 saw the start of a major vineyard planting programme on lands that had been fallow for a number of years. We planted 21Ha over seven years to add to an existing 8Ha of older vineyards. Our official maiden vintage was 2007 and in 2010 a spring water bottling plant on Fleurfontein was converted into a fully functional winery complete with offices tasting room processing facilities and barrel rooms.