TASTING NOTES
TASTING NOTES
Deep, purple core. Rich, berry fruit nose with lots of ripe, red plum and whiffs of white pepper. Some floral notes in the background, including violets, lavender, and spring blossoms. Full in the mouth with tremendous youthful vigour. Layers of berry fruit with developing spices of pepper, cinnamon, clove and vanilla. Gentle oak integration shows and supports the elegance and roundness at this early age.
Cellar Master:
Carl van der Merwe
Varietal blend:
100% Syrah
Appellation:
Stellenbosch
Alcohol content:
14.24%
TA:
5.1 g/l
pH:
3.8
RS:
2.3 g/l
Per Bottle R1,000.00 Add to cart
These vineyards are situated on the farm DeMorgenzon in the Stellenboschkloof. Soils are mostly weathered granite which gives the resultant wines a natural exuberance and youthful vigour. Planted in 2004 the trellised vineyard is managed to ensure natural high acidity and full flavour concentration.
2019 was a cooler vintage than the previous hot and dry years. Whilst the vineyards benefited from decent winter rainfall there were some latent stress effects from the previous year’s drought conditions. This resulted in some uneven budding and careful harvesting was necessary to achieve a total pick of optimum ripeness. Cool conditions during the early part of the ripening resulted in high acidities and low pH, resulting in wines that are fresh, precise and bright.
The Syrah was manually harvested and destalked into stainless steel fermentation tanks. A small percentage of bunches were fermented without destalking. Natural fermentation followed with a slight extended maceration on the skins to stabilize the colour and give the wine palate length. Fermentation temperatures were managed between 24°C and 30°C with a combination of punch downs and gentle pump overs to extract colour and flavour from the skins. After fermentation, the wine was pressed off the skins and malolactic fermentation was completed in barrel. The wine spent 10 months in 300L French oak barrels and a further 10 months in 3000L Fourdré barrels. After final blending the wine was transferred to 300 liter barrels for settling, after which the wine was racked and bottled without filtration.