Chardonnay

A luxurious wine, perfect on its own, but also ideal to partner with most seafood dishes and curries.

Quoin Rock Chardonnay is produced from the grapes of two of our farms, one in the Cape Agulhas (Elim) region and the other against Simonsberg in Stellenbosch. The Elim soils are mostly Bokkeveld, Koffieklip and Gravel, whereas the Stellenbosch soils are Oakleaf formed from decomposed granite with colluvial sandstone, gravel and friable granite. At harvest time, we handpick small lots of bunches early in the morning to ensure that the grapes are fresh when they get to the cellar.

After ageing the different components of the wine for 10 months, we carefully blend them to create a complex, full-bodied, mineral styled Chardonnay. The wine is then bottle aged for a minimum of one year before release.

We add the bunches to the press by hand as this ensures the integrity of the skins and minimises enzyme activity. After our specialised whole-bunch pressing programme, the must settles overnight before we rack it to its various fermentation vessels. No stone is left unturned with the making of this wine – to build complexity with an abundance of blends, we use stainless steel tanks, concrete eggs and 500-litre French oak barrels with 40 to 50% new French oak.

The name Quoin Rock found its inspiration from the Agulhas area the most southern tip of Africa where Quoin Point is the second most southernly point and where Quoin Rock Wines’ conservation farm Boskloof is located. Ships rounding the cape on their way back from or to markets in the east from the mid-1400’s to these modern times would stop over at the cape of good hope — todays Table Bay Harbour Cape Town to replenish their boats with fresh produce. Farms like Quoin Rock would rush produce to the harbour and from the late 1660’s wines from South Africa started forming part of the goods delivered to the port. Now just over 350 years later South African wines are still exported from Table Bay harbour. While wine production is the main activity at Quoin Rock in Stellenbosch the Agulhas farm Boskloof focuses on conservation. Bontebok springbok eland and zebra have been reintroduced to this area.