A Conversation in the Cellar | De Grendel Wines 

A Conversation in the Cellar with winemaker Charles Hopkins and Sir De Villiers Graaff.
De Grendel has pioneered wine-growing in some of South Africa’s youngest, most extreme and most exciting appellations, seeking out unique areas for the distinctive characteristics they bring to specific cultivars.
Elim, a tiny village close to Africa’s southern tip at Cape Agulhas, has an intensely maritime, cool-climate terroir that produces the alluring, sought-after rotundone style expressed in De Grendel Elim Shiraz.
Op Die Berg (“on the mountain”) is 300km inland on the Ceres Plateau and one of South Africa’s newest and most altitudinous wine-growing areas, and also one of the few with a truly continental climate. The vineyards are often blanketed by snow in winter, creating ideal resting and recovery conditions for the vines in dormancy, while the mountainous region’s hot days and cool nights in the growing season result in slower ripening and fruit concentration - providing ideal conditions overall for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
In addition to the vineyards on the home farm in Durbanville, De Grendel also sources grapes from other areas in Stellenbosch and Paarl that produce distinctive characteristics. In some respects, we are not wedded to terroir - preferring to blend wines from different regions to create our specific De Grendel signature of freshness, purity, depth. In other respects, we like to showcase the specific character that comes with some of the unique terroirs where we grow grapes.
Across all of our vineyards, we practice meticulous care of the growing environment together with minimal intervention in the cellar, allowing the grapes to express their growing environment and distinct varietal character.
The wines of De Grendel are all made in the modern, purpose-built cellar on the farm, where the cellar master and his team marry art and science in the practice of instinctive, age-old traditions of winemaking combined with state-of-the-art technology for monitoring and quality control.
www.degrendel....