Lingen

Beef, Lamb, Spicy food, Mature and hard cheese, Poultry

Stark-Condé Wines is located in the picturesque Jonkershoek Valley in Stellenbosch. It is a dramatic valley with steep changes in vineyard elevation from 150 to 600 metres making for a range of sites with distinct characteristics. At Stark-Condé they stick to traditional winemaking methods: open tank fermentation meticulous sorting of grapes hand-punchdowns basket pressing and maturation in small French oak barrels.

This vineyard is a pretty, 1,5 hectare “clos” owned by the Krige Family. It is too small to farm economically on its own and because Jonkershoek vineyards are so rare, we took a long-term contract on the vineyard and re-planted it with the idea of making a single-vineyard blended red. It is just up the road from Stark-Condé, but the soils are different – Vilafonte as opposed to the Clovelly and Hutton soils on Stark-Condé – and the resultant wines are correspondingly different: softer in structure and with a wild fynbos note.

After fermentation, the wine was basket pressed and racked into 300-l oak barrels, mostly 2nd fill, with some older oak and a small amount (about 15%) of new oak. After 20 months barrel maturation, the wine was bottled without fining and with no filtration.

The grapes for this wine were harvested over a month-long period from mid-February to mid-March. The grapes were cooled overnight before being de-stemmed and hand-sorted. The sorted grapes were then crushed into small, open-top fermentors and cold sored for three days before natural yeast fermentation. Fermentation occured over a period of 7-9 days with manual punch downs given every 4-6 hours.