Vagabond

A perfect partner for roast fowl, duck or pork, traditional Cape Malay & mild Cantonese cuisine, firm fine fromage & charcuterie or enjoy as an aperitif. Serve lightly chilled & best decanted. Vagabond most definitely benefits from careful cellaring, to slowly in complexity & showcase its generosity.

Combination of over 17 low yielding prime vineyard sites scattered across the length & breadth of the Cape from the Swartland, Stellenbosch, Elgin, Tradouw, Piketberg, Constantia, Montagu & Voor-Paardeberg - combining a myriad of ancient soils, aspects & climes representing vines ranging in age from 15 to 61 years old. Each site is hand harvested at dawn from mid-January to early March. A preceding cold and rainy winter, lead into a cool spring & a troublesome summer minus heatwaves – a vintage punctuated by serious and persistent rain, disease pressure and crushing crucial picking decisions resulted in a wet “normally chaotic” harvest – we only bottled two red wines from this vintage! An ultra elegantly troublesome vintage resulted in wines for cellaring &/or early enjoyment. 2023’s an elegant, linear & concentrated vintage, with great depth and nuance.

2023 marks the third vintage of the significant return “pivot” back to the “two winters” maturation of Vagabond – i.e. one winter in barrel, followed by a second winter in tank, allowing the wine to fully integrate & build mid-pallet, structure & naturally settle. The fruit is either crushed directly into small pneumatic press & allowed a few hours skin contact prior to gentle pressing or extremely slow whole-bunch pressed in an old horizontal basket press; thereafter all juice was settled overnight prior to racking with a fair share of fine lees into old 400L, 500L & 600L French oak casks. Each climate is fermented separately, long cool ferments of 3 ½ weeks plus are favoured. Some of the barrels undergo MLF, some don’t and after about 11 months a barrel selection of the components are made & blended into a temperature controlled Inox tank with fine lees and allowed a further 11 months of tempering prior to bottling unfined & unfiltered, with small amounts of sulphur utilized.

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.