Syrah – Ceres Plateau

The lightest stepper of the Damascene Syrahs, but with unrivalled purity of fruit. The vanguard opens with incredibly lifted elements of raspberry sherbet, red currants, pink peppercorn, and a touch of toffee apple candy. 
The palate shows more red fruit alongside pristine blood orange and red mulberry acidity. This is all underpinned by slightly deeper black cherry and blackberry, complicated by a savoury tang of dried gojiberry. The finish is characterised by vivid, youthful cherry-skin-tannins.

The 2023 vintage in Ceres Plateau was very similar to the Swartland, which is to say that the unfavourable effects of the vintage had left the vines with a bit of hangover. Some tactical pruning from the team helped to mitigate this, and a subsequent warm spell helped with vegetative growth, but it also pushed the whole timetable forward. Disease pressure was high in the weeks prior to harvest, but the experience of our viticultural team allowed us to “thread the needle” through the challenging conditions. The grapes were picked on 16 March, with a TA of close to 7g/l and a pH of 3.49. This demonstrates just how marked the effect of the extreme altitude can be in a season like this. When you taste the wine, you’ll get a sense of the magic of the Ceres Plateau.

This vineyard is planted into the Bokkeveld shale soils of the Witzenberg mountain range, atop the Ceres Plateau. Situated in one of South Africa’s most elevated growing regions, this vineyard has an altitude of exactly 1000m ASL, and features all the textbook extremes of such a site. During the winter periods, the vineyard gets covered with snow, and the intense diurnal shift also ensures that ripening is usually quite slow. It’s invariably the last vineyard that we harvest each vintage.

The fruit was harvested by hand on April 16th. Syrah from the Ceres Plateau has massive intensity and therefore one needs to take one’s foot off the pedal in the winery to achieve wines that are balanced. The higher level of natural tannins in the fruit dictated that only 60% of the fruit needed to be fermented as whole clusters. The rest of the fruit was de-stemmed and fermented as whole berries. Fermentation took place in tulip-shaped concrete fermenters, and the submerged-cap technique was used during fermentation. The purpose of this is to soften the structure of the wine, while still showcasing the intensity of these high-altitude vineyards. Primary fermentation and malolactic conversion both took place spontaneously, after which the wine was matured in 2000-litre conical Austrian oak vats for 11 months. The wine was bottled without fining to ensure a more complex and authentic expression of Syrah.

This wine will be at its most expressive within three to five years.

Total production: 1692 x 750ml and 85 x 1.5L

Bottling date: 15 January 2024

Alc: 12.58 % Vol

pH: 3.55

TA: 5.4 g/L

RS: 1.7 g/L