Vagabond

For an ideal foil to mild Cantonese & Cape Malay cuisine, soft fromage & charcuterie or simply sip on its own. Serve lighlty chilled & best decanted in youth.

Combination of low yielding prime vineyard sites scattered across the length & breadth of the Cape combining a myriad of ancient soils, aspects & climes. All fruit was hand harvested at dawn. Quite possibly the most tempestuous vintage in the Cape – super low winter rainfall, early spring, hot summer, heat waves & erratic weather – resulted in small clusters of fruit, great concentration & very lithe wines.

Each component was matured separately for about 9 months prior to a barrel selection, final blending and bottled unfined & unfiltered. Only yeast & small amounts of sulphur are added during the process.

The Chardonnay – both cool climate climats one on Table Mountain sandstones, the other on sandstone shale soils; Viognier – a small block wedged in sandstone shales; & Verdelho – a five year old block harvested second week January - were crushed, allowed a period of skin contact, pressed directly into old French oak barrels of varying size, inoculated with neutral yeasts strains & cold fermented. Old bush vine Swartland Steen from granitic soils was naturally fermented in large old French barrels & matured in puncheon. The Grenache blanc was allowed extended skin contact, crushed, settled & racked into 400L barrels inoculated with neutral yeasts.

The Fledge & Company is what happens when two folk don’t quite enjoy the status quo when it’s your nature to go against the grain when you need to forge a path mostly in the unknown eschewing common place convention and taking that first defiant flight from the nest. Hand crafting old school wines of integrity unfaltering quality defying perceptions of origin and being guided solely by the vine to showcase our passion – these are The Fledge & Co.’s reasons for being.