Paper Kite 2024
Semillons blanc and gris
Tasting Notes
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 here. 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 61 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.
The wine shows savoury aromas of hay, delicate yellow fruits and nut flesh. The palate has focus and breadth, with an entry of lime, salted melon and macadamia nuts leading to a rich finish of meringue and nougat.
Nuts & Bolts
Semillon blanc and gris – Swartland - 61 year old vineyard on alluvial granite soil
Residual sugar – 2.5 g/L
Total acidity – 6.0 g/L
pH 3.25
About The Wine
The tail end of 2023 was distinctly unsummery with one of the coldest, wettest Decembers on record. In January it felt like we had “stepped through the looking glass” with one of the hottest and driest January months in a long time. It certainly set the tone for quite a frenetic start to the harvest.
That being said, we picked the Paper Kite vineyard on Valentines day which is when we normally pick it and we had a fantastic crop off the vineyard this year. The fruit was beautifully ripe, healthy and not showing the heat stress from the tail end of the season. I’m pleased to say that one of the barrels of this wine is forming the basis of our first Cape Winemakers Guild wine, blended with some incredible Sauvignon blanc from the Skurfberg.
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 we possibly can while still delivering pristine and balanced wines. The grapes are whole-bunch pressed in our old Vaslin press and there are no additions of sulphur dioxide made on the juice. A rough settling follows pressing after which the wines undergo natural alcoholic and malolactic fermentation into a mix of new 500L Austrian barrels and smaller old oak barrels. Going to barrel with cloudier, phenolic juice gives us a great foundation for the textural elements that will develop in the wine.
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 sulphur dioxide late in the winter, and then again at bottling, keeping the level of sulphur dioxide very low in the wine.