Copper Pot 2020
Pinot noir
Tasting Notes
We first began producing our Copper Pot Pinot noir as a dedicated wine for our family’s hotel, Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse, in the KZN Drakensberg. Since then the wine has taken on a life of its own and we feel very privileged to be able to work with this cultivar in one of South Africa’s best Pinot noir growing regions.
We love Pinot noir for its supple, delicate power and its ability to elegantly and honestly express its origins. We take to heart the challenge of producing a great wine from this exacting varietal and like so many other Pinot lovers you will often find a bottle on our table.
We vinify the wine as sympathetically as possible with wild yeasts, a percentage of whole cluster ferments and maturation in old oak barrels.
Copper Pot shows aromas of bright pomegranate, hibiscus and raspberry coulis, with underlying notes of pine needle and wild herbs. In the mouth it is finely balanced showing an integrated acidity and fine tannins, these being balanced out by generous red fruit and fennel freshness. The finish is satisfyingly dry with a touch of nutmeg and earthiness.
Nuts & Bolts
Pinot noir - WO Western Cape
Residual sugar β 2.90 g/L
Total acidity β 5.7 g/L; pH 3.42
About The Wine
Our 2020 Pinot noir is sourced from a handful of vineyards in the Overberg region, where good soils (predominantly clay/shale and quartz/sandstone) and cool growing conditions combine to produce wonderful Pinot noir that is both rich and perfumed. We also source from a small parcel of organically farmed Pinot noir in the Bottelary hills on decomposed granite soil.
Pinot noir has always played a role in our work in wine and it is a grape that we are very passionate about. We try to be as precise as possible when we pick the grapes, allowing for a generous fruit maturity without losing the freshness and tension that we love in the wines.
Our winemaking is as minimal as possible. All our ferments take place using wild yeasts, and we don’t use any additives (other than minimal SO2 at crush and during maturation). 40-60% of whole clusters are used in the fermentation to bring a natural structure and savouriness to the wines. Extraction is kept very gentle using a combination of pump-overs and punchdowns, and the wines spend about 30 days on skins in total to allow a gentle evolution of their structure.
The wines are matured for 9 months in a mix of older small French oak barrels to avoid a dominant oak character, and round out their structure before blending and bottling. Our focus during maturation is to retain a brightness and clarity of fruit that we really appreciate in Pinot noir.