Winemaker Notes
The 2024 Mullineux Straw Wine has a beautiful luminous golden colour. The exceptionally
well-balanced acidity and attractive viscosity of this vin de paille-style wine is highlighted on
the palate. Grown in the ancient granite soils of the Paardeberg, it has a very distinct flavour
profile reminding one of Mebos, with an intense mouthfeel like that of silky lemon meringue
pie. The extraordinarily fresh and lingering finish, culminating from the old vines of the
Swartland, which also allow dappled sunlight to penetrate the canopies of the bush-vines and
develop the stone fruit aromas of this wine.
Best served chilled with savoury-lead or sweet desserts or a combination of hard cheeses. Vegan-Friendly
Professional Ratings
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Vinous
The 2024 Straw Wine comes from deep, decomposed granite soils in Paardeberg that offer the highest natural malic acid to counter the concentration. The fruit is dried off the vine for four weeks, with ten months' fermentation before it naturally comes to a halt. It has extraordinarily pure acacia honey, orange pith and tangerine scents that are beautifully defined. The palate has stunning delineation, a razor-sharp line of acidity and ample weight, but it is not cloying in any way. The finish feels quite stem ginger, leaving the mouth tingling afterwards. Brilliant.
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James Suckling
Honey, golden raisins, figs, candied oranges, dried pineapples and lemonade on the nose of this concentrated dessert wine. So much sweet, dried-fruit goodness packed in, beautifully balanced by sharp acidity. Long and intense. From chenin blanc grapes grown on granite soil, dried for four weeks in the shade. Drink or hold.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
Literally meaning "the black land," Swartland takes its name from the endangered, indigenous "renosterbos" (translating to rhino bush), which used to be plentiful enough to turn the entire landscape a dark color certain during times of year. The district, attracting some of the most adventurous and least interventionist winemakers, excels in robust and full-bodied reds as well as quality fortified wines.