Rocking Horse 2024
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 of a classic Cape white wine.
The wine is composed from a number of carefully selected vineyard sites in the Western Cape. The 2024 vintage is complex, nuanced and dense. The nose shows lots of flint, ripe yellow fruit and barley water. The palate is full, rich and engaging with layers of quince, honey, saline acidity and brioche.
Nuts & Bolts
Roussanne – 28% Stellenbosch / Paardeberg
15 years old - decomposed granite / clay
Chenin blanc – 23% Paardeberg
45 years old - decomposed granite and Malmesbury 41 years old iron-rich soils
Chardonnay – 23% Ceres Plateau
11 years old - sandstone over clay and Piekenierskloof 19 years old - sandstone
Semillon blanc – 19% Swartland
62 and 15 years old - alluvial soils
Clairette blanche – 7% Worcester
45 years old - alluvial soils
About The Wine
A cold, wet winter and spring set us up for a lighter crop over most of our vineyards. On balance a lighter crop and some water reserves in the soils were a big help in ripening the grapes during a very hot early harvest period. I love the 2024 wines. They were a little angular and awkward in their early stages but have shown their beautiful depth of character and what I can only describe as a profound density of fruit that will continue to unfurl over many years. This is a very special vintage of Rocking Horse as well and a great successor to the magical 2023 wine.
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’. 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.