Fleurfontein

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

2024 will be remembered as a good vintage on Keermont, although yields were generally very low resulting in a small crop. We had a very cold and wet winter resulting in substantial flooding in the Cape. Fortunately, we didn’t sustain too much damage and the conditions were actually very beneficial to the vineyards. The cool, wet weather led to slow budding. The young shoots are suspectable to attack over this period and damage can be caused by snails, Duiker (small buck), and baboons. Spring warmed up and the vines started to grow strongly. We had good rain showers during the early season to keep the vineyards going, although may have affected flowering leading to lighter bunches. The middle of the season dried up and, from Christmas onwards, we experience several heatwaves. This dried the vineyards out quickly and led to some sunburn on exposed bunches. The light crop ripened quickly under the warm conditions and we started harvesting early (23 January). We quickly progressed through the different varieties and by the end of February, all of the grapes had been harvested except for the dried grapes for Fleurfontein. Yields were down by about 30% on average, but despite fairly tough conditions in the late season, the vineyards looked healthy and balanced throughout the vintage. The grapes tasted amazing and had good analysis and I expect that we are going to have some beautifully intense wines.

This is slowly fermented by indigenous yeast in Hungarian and French oak barrels and then matures in these barrels for about 15 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.