The sullen grey, gloom of a Cape winter was clearing, but my palate was still gripped by a dense, unrelenting film of cloying red wine tannin. It has been a cold red winter, one that saw the daily partaking of dark, plum-coloured wines. Brooding. Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinotage and Bordeaux blends, Merlot and Pinot Noir. And these wines were, mostly, good and fine, satisfying in the chilly depths of dark and stormy nights. But the senses now required clarity after the deluge of wooded red offerings, all plump and plush in their regal, admirable density.
As the sky broke last week, and the sun rose and shone, the mountains of Franschhoek bled, this blood being clear and pale and iridescent in the form of Sauvignon Blanc wine from Chamonix Estate, the first vintage from the farm’s newly planted vineyards. The estate had, apart from the old Chenin Blanc vineyard planted in 1965, undergone a total replanting in 2022 and 2023, the stubborn, tired virussed vines ripped-out of the rocky, clay mountain soils and replaced with lusty vines, young and new.
New vineyards on Chamonix Estate, Franschhoek
Thus, 2025 saw the first grapes from these youthful vines being picked and hauled to the Chamonix mountain cellar. They were Sauvignon Blanc grapes, growing at 450m above sea-level, and even as these verdant bunches arrived to be sorted, they showed a will and an energy, a desire to prove themselves as being able to undergo the process of vinification and to appear, reimagined, in the form of a glass of white wine.
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