Bastardo do Castello

Enjoy this wine with any of your favourite red meat dishes, especially venison.

Over the next 24 months maturation, we racked the wine from barrel to barrel to improve the natural mechanical sedimentation and cleaning process. This wine never saw a filter in its life.

66 Vines don’t yield a lot of fruit, so this first vintage was fermented in a wooden fruit bin, with a bin liner. No tech was used in sorting, crushing, pumping or conveying of the fruit to the bin. Instead, the grapes were dropped into the bin as whole bunches and I got Christian and Jani to do a nice relaxing foot stomp. The addition of a bit of SO2 helped to stave off the nasties. Natural fermentation was quick and punch downs were the order of the day. This lasted for about a week. The wine was pressed quite quickly after fermentation and put into a small barrel.

Pilgrim Wines is a unique wine company, dedicated to inspire, teach and surprise. We are a small family-owned business with a passion for wine making. Well-known Winemaker Henry Kotzé (former Morgenster and now at the iconic Mulderbosch) carefully crafts the wines for owner and Viticulturist wife Riëtte Kotzé’s Pilgrim Wines brand. We do not have our own vineyards, at the moment we source our grapes from small pockets of vineyards that we have come across in our everyday paths. These distinct parcels of land, happen to be in our home-grown Stellenbosch area and the amazing Voor Paardeberg regions. We partner with like minded ethical growers and believe in leaving nothing but footprints for the next generation. We focus on innovative methods with tried and tested cultivars, as well as experimental styles with unorthodox, unfamiliar cultivars. We like to discover the new and untried pathways in the journey of grape to bottle.