2026 Release Notes
In the past year, it has been so busy it is hard to work through the diary and reflect on everything that has transpired, be it good or bad at times, but much has happened for the better. Last year at this time, we co-hosted the Back to the Swartland Revolution, an anniversary event marking 10 years since the last one.
2025 Release Notes
Since our last release, so much has transpired that it sometimes seems almost too scary to reflect on it all; time is flying by at a tremendous pace. We must make time to sit down, cook a decent meal, and have the good bottle of wine with the ones who matter most and more often.
2024 Release Notes
After having had one of the wettest winters in many decades, we have just lived through one of the driest summer patches in the Swartland ever recorded. It has practically not rained here for the past six months, but we hope these adverse and extreme climatic patterns will end.
2023 Release Notes
Since our last release, we have had a very unusual, one of the driest seasons on paper. But for this release, we will see the warm and windy 2022 vintages of the Old Vine Series being bottled from various districts of the Cape, and they are looking very fruit forward, and it will be a tough one to lay them down as the wines are pretty “open”.
2022 Release Notes
Yet another year has gone by and looking backward at the seemingly dwindling Covid pandemic and its realities, we can already, out of the corner of our eye see the Ukraine invasion and even more disturbing economic facts and severe loss of life, and in very many cases those of ordinary families and their future legacy.
2021 Release Notes
While writing these notes on the past year, it has actually dawned on me that it has been over 12 months now that most of us have been living with the new reality of Covid 19 and the massive cost it has on all levels of society.
2020 Release Notes
It is impossible to write anything at this point in time without some reference to Covid-19 and its global effect and impact on realities. For many the unknown and the sense of insecurity transfer into growing apprehension and fear and yet, in farming the unknown is part of everyday life.
2019 Release Notes
As I am writing these notes we are busy planting the post-harvest cover crops and it struck me that apart from the fact that you plant seeds in dry earth with faith that it will rain, it was exactly a year ago we referred to the incredible tough years of drought and we could not see our way through living another harvest as tough as that of 2018… but 2019 was even more extreme.
2018 Release Notes
We finished pressing the last of this 2018 vintage and live in the hope that it is never to be repeated again in terms of the drought conditions and their effect. When we lived the reality of the drought in the 2016 to 2017 season we thought it could
not in any way get worse, but were we wrong and looking back at the 2017 vintage today, it seems to have been a breeze compared to our most recent harvest.
2017 Release Notes
We have just picked 2017 on the back of that same drought and that is a completely new story which we will only be able to tell and drink next year. The Signature wines, always being a year older at release, is from the 2015 vintage, one that
was just spectacular.
2016 Release Notes
This is one of our most compact releases thus far and the quality across the selection of bottling is at a place where we are very happy with our progress. The battle still is and will forever be to gain enough ripeness with acidity, because the acidity in our grapes has been taking a hammering with the current drought – and that after a succession of warm and dry years.