We first began producing our Copper Pot Pinot noir as a dedicated wine for our family’s hotel, Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse, in the KZN Drakensberg. Since then the wine has taken on a life of its own and we feel very privileged to be able to work with this cultivar in one of South Africa’s best Pinot noir growing regions.

We love Pinot noir for its supple, delicate power and its ability to elegantly and honestly express its origins. We take to heart the challenge of producing a great wine from this exacting varietal and like so many other Pinot lovers you will often find a bottle on our table.

We vinify the wine as sympathetically as possible with wild yeasts, a percentage of whole cluster ferments and maturation in old oak barrels.

This year’s vintage has a perfumed nose showing mulberries, humbugs, rosewater, and buchu. Tannins are fine while the palate is fresh with complex, balancing savoury notes of mace mixed with plums, redcurrants and dried fig.

Our Pinot Noir is sourced from a handful of vineyards in the Overberg region, where good soils (predominantly clay/shale and quartz/sandstone) and cool growing conditions combine to produce wonderful Pinot Noir that is both rich and perfumed. We also source from a small parcel of organically farmed Pinot noir in the Bottelary hills on decomposed granite soil.

Pinot Noir has always played a role in our work in wine and it is a grape that we are very passionate about. We try to be as precise as possible when we pick the grapes, allowing for a generous fruit maturity without losing the freshness and tension that we love in the wines.

The 2020/2021 growing season was very cool and mild with plenty of rainfall during the green season which saw a lot of weed and mildew pressure during the growing season. A cool harvest period saw the grapes ripening up at surprisingly low sugar levels resulting in very fine-boned and elegant wines.

Our winemaking is as minimal as possible. All our ferments take place using wild yeasts, and we don’t use any additives (other than minimal SO2 at crush and during maturation). 40-60% of whole clusters are used in the fermentation to bring a natural structure and savouriness to the wines. Extraction is kept very gentle using a combination of pump-overs and punchdowns, and the wines spend about 30 days on skins in total to allow a gentle evolution of their structure.

The wines are matured for 9 months in a mix of older small French oak barrels to avoid a dominant oak character, and round out their structure before blending and bottling. Our focus during maturation is to retain a brightness and clarity of fruit that we really appreciate in Pinot Noir.