Paper Kite

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I love this old clonal material of Semillon. It gives us wines that are more about texture and depth, and less about primary fruit aromatics. Our vinifications don't follow a recipe but rather a mantra of doing as little as possibly can while still delivering pristine and balanced wines. The grapes are whole-bunch pressed in our Vaslin press and there are no additions of sulphur dioxide made on the juice. A rough settling follows pressing into a mix of new 500L Austrian barrels and smaller old oak barrels after which the wines undergo natural alcoholic and malolactic fermentation. Going to barrel with cloudier, phenolic juice gives us a great foundation for the textural element that will develop in the wine.

One of the key heritage varietals in South Africa is Semillon, a grape variety that the modern wine industry was practically built on, but which now finds itself as a small presence in the viticultural landscape. There are still a number of incredible old Semillon vineyards in existence and we have been fortunate enough to work with some of them. Paper Kite is our expression of old vine South African Semillon, and it is sourced from a 62 year-old vineyard in Swartland. These old clones of Semillon (including a tiny amount of Semillon gris dotted about the vineyards) deliver an expression of Semillon that is very much at odds with the modern aromatic clones. The wines they produce are hauntingly beautiful and difficult to define, taking many years to achieve their full aromatic expression.

Semillon has a tendency to become very reductive during maturation so we generally do some racking at the end of fermentation to leave the heaviest lees behind, and have begun to work with a short maturation time in our large, new Austrian oak barrels to balance this tendency. We add some SO2 late in the winter, and then again at bottling, keeping the level of sulphur dioxide very low in the wine.