Shiraz

Meat dishes with rich, deep flavours will pair well with this wine.

2020 was in all aspects a very cool vintage, with slightly smaller crops. The growing season was quite windy, leading to smaller bunches and less dense canopies. Harvest itself was altogether early and can be characterized by 2 distinct periods – before the rain and after the rain! There was quite a heavy downpour in late February, early March which made deciding to pick quite difficult. You would have been lucky to have all your berries in before the deluge, as after it took a bit for the vines to achieve the same concentration in ripening. Harvesting of the Shiraz took place on 3rd of March 2020

Maturation lasted 18 months in 50% neutral 300L barrels, and 50% third fill 228L barrels with American heads.

From the start, my intention to work with Shiraz was to produce the perfect inbetweener wine – a goldilocks wine. There are in general 2 polar styles to Shiraz/Syrah in South Africa (hence the use of the 2 different varietal names depicting the style in which it is produced). One is the more traditional South African big and juicy fruit. The other style is one where the younger generation winemakers were so adamant to move away from the “old” style, that they went the polar antithesis to what has been the staple for so long (and good for them all to try and buck the trend) That is what sparked my interest in perusing that “golden mean” wine - purely because the styles are currently so far removed - there should surely be one! So looking for that perfect balance for me, means looking for perfectly ripe fresh fruit backed with peppery, stalky spice. I am looking for subtle fine tannins but balanced by perfectly tuned finesse. To do this, I use a very specific amount of oxygen during fermentation, coupled with very precise levels of extraction, as well as a certain amount of whole bunch fermentation. For the 2020 vintage I used 15% whole bunch fermentation.

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.