Bruce Jack Wines Tumbleweed Wild Pinotage 2024
£10.25
The wine
Crafted from Swartland's warm climate and koffieklip-rich soils, this Pinotage showcases its vibrant lineage of Cinsault and Pinot Noir. Bright plum and cherry notes shine, complemented by a hint of spice and soft, supple tannins, leading to a smooth, lingering finish.
Pinotage is South Africa's own grape, created in 1925 by Abraham Perold, who crossed Pinot Noir with Cinsault, then called Hermitage. It spent decades with a poor reputation, largely earned by over-extraction and careless winemaking, and has been rehabilitated by producers treating it gently. Wild fermented here, in a fresher register.
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.
