Bruce Jack Wines Tumbleweed Sundance Viognier 2024
£12.75
The wine
This Viognier captures the radiance of sunrise in a glass. The bouquet is a symphony of peach blossom, ripe stone fruit and vibrant citrus, all seamlessly layered with a hint of vanilla. Lush yet balanced, with a refined, lingering finish.
Viognier needs warmth to develop its apricot and blossom perfume, and the Breedekloof valley provides it while the surrounding mountains funnel cool air down at night. The variety came close to extinction in its Rhône homeland in the 1960s, reduced to a few hectares at Condrieu, before its revival worldwide.
The producer
Bruce Jack Wines
View all Bruce Jack Wines winesBruce Jack Wines is a small team built around head winemakers Bruce Jack and Marlize Beyers, who have worked together since 2002 and between them have experience across a great many of the world's wine regions.
The wines are sourced from across the Western Cape rather than from a single estate, which is deliberate: Swartland for old bush-vine Chenin and Syrah, the cooler Overberg and Cape coast for aromatics and acidity, Breedekloof for Viognier. Working that way lets them choose the site that suits each grape instead of forcing everything from one patch of ground.
Tumbleweed is the everyday range and Off the Charts the more adventurous one, taking in skin-contact whites and old-vine parcels. Skin contact means white grapes fermented on their skins as though they were red, which draws out colour, texture and grip; it is one of the oldest methods in winemaking and one of the most fashionable, and the Cape's old Chenin and Clairette vineyards are unusually well suited to it.
