Private Cellar Pinotage

The Rijk's Private Cellar Pinotage 2020 pairs excellently with grilled meats, rich stews, game, and hard cheeses. Its bold flavors and structure make it a versatile wine for a variety of robust dishes​.

The grapes come from low-yielding, well-drained vertical shale soils in Tulbagh, with a yield of 6.4 tons per hectare. The vines face west-north-west and east, optimizing sun exposure for ideal ripening. Grapes were harvested at night to preserve their freshness​.

After a 48-hour cold maceration period to extract color and flavor, fermentation occurred with manual punch-downs three times per day. The wine was matured for 22 months in a mix of 60% French and 40% American oak barrels, with 40% new barrels and the remainder in second- and third-fill barrels​.

Rijk’s is situated 120km North-East of Cape Town and 80km East of the Atlantic ocean in a Mediterranean climate. Our valley is surrounded by the Obiqua, Winterhoek, and Witzenberg mountains which reach heights of up to 1 995m. Lover of good food and collector of good wines, Neville Dorrington had been working in Cape Town for more than 20 years. In 1996 Neville and his family decided to move to the countryside and grow and produce their own wine. We fell in love with the Tulbagh valley and came across 137 hectares of virgin soils that were never cultivated. The slopes faced north, south, east, and west and the analysis of the vertical shale soils revealed the potential for low-yielding, high-quality grapes. Today Rijk’s only focuses on producing Chenin Blanc and Pinotage. Rijk’s has been named in honour of the governor Rijk Tulbagh who governed the Cape from 1751-1771.