Mid-winter in South Africa

It is now mid-winter in South Africa with day temperatures varying between 10 and 18 degrees Celsius while the nights can be as low as 0 to 5.

In the De Grendel vineyards some pruning activities have already started, but more on information and pictures on that in our next update to you as we would like to include the full process with pictures.

A week ago we bottled our first 2012 white wines of the season from the cellar. So much time and preparation goes into the vineyards before harvesting and then in the cellar through the whole winemaking process to ensure the best possible wine for the specific vintage – that this last piece of the puzzle is just as important for us. So easily something can go wrong in these last steps where we put our wine, made with meticulous detail, in the bottle.

Due to this huge risk, we are very peculiar on the bottling of our wines and the processes involved. Our goal is to stabilize our wines (cold and protein) and then filter to a full “holding tank” to ensure that sulphur, CO2 and dissolved oxygen levels are exactly what we are aspiring to at bottling.

In the first picture you can see one of our quality processes – where we are checking our dissolved oxygen in the tank by probe of the oxygen metre. Our goal is to get the dissolve oxygen level (mg/l) as low as possible in the tank to protect the wine, as there will always be an oxygen pick up during bottling.

We are extremely fortunate that due to the location of our vineyards and our terroir, coupled by winemaking practises, we have wine with a low pH value. The lower pH value has a direct effect on the effectiveness of the sulphur and we can therefore get away with half of what the norm is. This also ensures longevity of the wine in the bottle. We can therefore ensure that the wine is bottled with low levels of free and total sulphur. Knowing that our wine is healthy we only need to put the wine through a very course filter at bottling, not harming or “stripping” the wine in any way.

At De Grendel we do not produce mass quantities of wine, and effectively only bottle between 16 – 20 days per year. We therefore prefer using a mobile bottling line that is in operation daily and keep up with the latest of technology.

We have evaluated quite a few mobile lines, as this is such an important part in the winemaking process and have been using the same people for the last 6 years as quality are equally important to them.

The wine we have bottled now will only be released end of August, beginning September to ensure that that the wine has the maximum time to recover after the bottling shock and reach the consumer at the optimum time!

Kind regards,

Charles Hopkins                                                       Elzette du Preez

Cellar Master                                                           Winemaker

De Grendel Wines                                                   De Grendel Wines