In most cases, when you visit a winery, it is to taste the wine, talk to the winemaker and see the vineyard and cellar. Only on the rare occasion you also get the possibility to actually make your own wine. But that is what our travel guests on the latest wine tour to South Africa did.
You don’t really have the possibility to make the wine from A to Z in a short visit. But what you can do is one of the most important steps in the winemaking process: the blending.
At the Rickety Bridge winery in Franschhoek in South Africa we all had the opportunity to “blend your own wine”. We had a number of different raw-material to start with. Unblended wines from different grape varieties, with our without oak ageing.
It is a great and exciting exercise that gives you quite some insight into what the winemaker does. And it is also a lot of fun. Should it be a little more syrah? Is the oak too present? I’d like a bit more tannin to give structure, how do I get it?…
Here is my bottle:
30% pinotage, 65% syrah and 5% merlot.
I brought it home and have kept it in the cellar since then. The other day I brought it up for dinner. As always we (one of us) taste blind and has to give an opinion. Here’s what Britt thought of it:
Powerful, dark colour, lots of fruit, quite ripe fruit, quite a lot of oak, a touch smoky (syrah?), spicy, violets.
Join us on our tour to South Africa in March for this kind of great wine experiences. More info on the South Africa wine tour here.
More pictures from that visit:
