Wanna taste pure Fernão Pires?

Fernão WWHHAATTTT? was my first thought.

To understand the remoteness of this site, I invite you to go to Google maps and connect the location points of 3 towns: Malmesbury, Hopefield and Darling with straight lines - this will form a triangle. If you pinpoint the center, that's about as close as you’ll get to spotting this vineyard.

Thirteen years ago I asked the owner of the farm for directions - I needed an urgent shortcut to Cape Town… or translated to Afrikaans: a “Kortpad Kaaptoe”. He explained directions using his vineyards as reference points. But then he said: you take a left at the Fernão Pires. Needless to say, it took me a bit longer to get to Cape Town, but I had found my next vineyard.

At that point I had never heard of Fernão Pires. Knowing what I know now, the appearance of the plants that day in the sweltering Swartland heat explained it all. You see, being a Portuguese grape varietal and a  product of thousands of years of mutation, the cultivar adapted in order to handle heat and an excess of sunlight. Picture the lightly coloured sandy topsoil reflecting the sun from below and the ball of fire from the top in scorching Swartland summer temperatures - hectic conditions to say the least.

The bunches are loose, the berries thickly skinned. And with its fine powder-perfume, fragranced-flavour tasting profile and lower natural acidity, the grape is suited to do 4 pickings in a season, each 3 days apart. This enables me to capture 4 different ripening stages in 4 different wines, which I ultimately combine to form the final wine.

This wine was pressed as whole bunches and fermented spontaneously in older oak barrels. A year on the lees and voila! I’ve been making this wine since 2012 and think it's the best vintage to date.

The other name for the cultivar is Maria Gomes! Beautiful names! It sounds like the name of a ruler and his princess; the ruler of never-never land: Your Grace, King Fernão Pires and his beautiful Princess Maria Gomes…

Don’t be intimidated by the strangeness of the varietal; you don’t have to pronounce it. After all, you are a BLANKBOTTLE client - and a BLANKBOTTLE client “se ma maak nie bang kinders groot nie”. It is a gorgeous wine.

Be bold and step into the unknown!