BLANKBOTTLE OFFSPRING 2015

By November 2015, I had mostly made up my mind about my new wines destined for bottling in January 2016 - a process that takes months to complete. At that stage I had 21 white wine components sitting in barrel that was ready for bottling - some as single varietal wines and some in blends. It all changed when I met a guy on a plane called Mark Drummond. One thing led to another and ultimately to the wine called Limbic and Orbitofrontal Cortex. (If you’re not familiar with these wines, you can read the story here.) In short we made a blend by tapping into my subconscious reactions to the various white wine components I had in the cellar at the time. To counter that wine, we also made the best blend according to my conscious mind. 

Now these wines obviously messed up my planning for the January 2016 bottling completely - taking out some of the vital components of other planned wines. This gave birth to an OFFSPRING, the child of Dad OrbitofrontalCortex and Mom Limbic (not the leftovers all thrown together - if I feel that a component doesn’t quite measure up, it gets demoted to a leftover tank which I sell as bulk wine). This OFFSPRING was thoughtfully blended - Semillon from Elgin, Chenin blanc from Wellington and Verdelho from the Voor Paardeberg. All the components were made separately. As the grapes came into the winery,  it was pressed and the juice went straight to tank. It received no additions and from there went straight to older french oak barrels, underwent spontaneous fermentation, stayed in barrel for one year, received a small amount of sulpher, got blended and finally bottled. This unplanned wine scored 94 points out of 100 in the recent Tim Atkin report on South African wine. So the wine turned out really nicely. This is the official release.