Paper Kite 2025
Old Vine Semillon
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. 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.
A floral opening shows orange blossom and white flowers, with crushed bay leaves and an exotic yellow note that hints at both banana skin and fresh turmeric. The palate is viscous and lightly honeyed, defined by butterscotch, key limes and candied ginger, with texture and focus from kumquat rind and a wet pebble acidity.
Nuts & Bolts
Semillon blanc and gris – Swartland, 61 year old vineyard on alluvial granite soil
About The Wine
2025 was a picture-perfect season that one doesn’t get to experience all that often and it was very satisfying being able to ripen this vineyard fully as we are normally being pushed to pick by the heat. Semillon really benefits from a slow ripening and we were able to pick the Kweperfontein vineyard about a week later than usual.
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 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 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 SO2 late in the winter, and then again at bottling, keeping the level of sulphur dioxide very low in the wine.