Rocking Horse 2022
Cape White Blend
Tasting Notes
Rocking Horse is our cornerstone wine and takes its name from a wooden rocking horse that we made for our daughters out of old oak barrel staves. This is our signature wine and it is where all our work comes together to showcase our vision for a Cape White blend.
The wine is composed from a number of carefully selected vineyard sites in the Western Cape. A layered and complex nose reveals green pineapple, kumquat, nori, and lime leaf, leading into a nervy, focused palate of citrus, ginger and stone fruit with a long taut, slightly saline finish.
Nuts & Bolts
Semillon blanc – 35% Franschhoek – 39 years old - alluvial soils
Roussanne – 28% Stellenbosch / Paardeberg – 13 years old - decomposed granite / clay
Chenin blanc – 14% Paardeberg 43 years old - decomposed granite
Chardonnay – 13% Ceres Plateau 9 years old – clay
Clairette blanche – 10%Worcester 44 years old - alluvial soils
Residual sugar – 2.6 g/L
Total acidity – 6.4 g/L; pH 3.28
About The Wine
The 2021-2022 growing season showed a sharp contrast of a cool, wet spring followed by a very hot and dry January. This made for a challenging season all round with a lot of disease pressure in the early season. We are incredibly grateful for the diligence of our growers in tackling these challenging seasons so well. Yields were moderate and careful selection ensured that we had a great quality in the cellar.
Our vineyard selection supports our vision to deliver a blended Cape White wine of depth, texture and subtlety. In sourcing Roussanne, Chardonnay, Semillon, Clairette blanche and Chenin blanc, we are looking for both heritage and more recently established vineyards which all bring their own unique elements and ability to ‘speak’ about the place in which they are grown.
The winemaking remains simple. Our primary challenge during the harvest is to ensure that we pick all of our far-flung blocks at the right time and get them back to the winery in perfect condition. Once this is achieved, we revert to working with very little in the way of ‘winemaking technique’.
Picking is done early and based mostly on taste with an eye on the style of the wine that we’re aiming at. We are not looking for a big alcohol expression (nor a low alcohol one for that matter) and prefer subtle wines that show ripeness, while being restrained and elegant.
The grapes are whole-bunch pressed and no treatments or additions are used on the juice. This hands-off regime on the juice really helps to develop the character of the wine. The juice is then racked off the heavy solids and taken to old oak barrels of various volumes. The wines are fermented naturally, and they are allowed to then go through their subsequent malolactic fermentation. We watch them carefully for the next few months until they ‘settle down’, at which point we add some sulphur dioxide. Primary fruit is not what we are looking for here, rather we’re trying to show the underlying character of the grapes and the vineyard where they came from.