Lismore Estate Vineyards Estate Reserve Cuvée Blanc 2022
£41.95
The wine
Fragrant aromas of yellow plum, spice and orange blossom lead to a beautifully balanced palate, with crisp acidity, saline mineral notes and a lemongrass-embroidered finish. Roussanne leads a blend you will not find anywhere else in the Cape.
A white Rhône blend rather than a Burgundian one: Chardonnay for structure with Viognier and Roussanne for aromatics and weight. Roussanne is the more difficult of the two, prone to oxidation and erratic yields, but it gives a honeyed, herbal depth nothing else provides. Barrel fermented, from the Greyton home vineyards.
The producer
Lismore Estate Vineyards
View all Lismore Estate Vineyards winesSamantha O'Keefe left California in 2003, bought land in the foothills near Greyton in the Overberg, and planted vines where nobody had planted them before. Lismore Estate Vineyards grew up alongside her two young sons, and much of the early work she did herself.
The site is the point. The vineyards sit at around 300 metres in a cool corner of the Cape South Coast, chilled by winter snow on the mountains above and ventilated through summer, which gives a much longer, slower ripening season than the classic Cape regions further north. The wines that result are cool-climate in character, built on acidity and detail rather than power, and made almost entirely by hand.
In December 2019 a wildfire swept through the property and destroyed the cellar, the equipment and her home. She rebuilt from nothing, borrowed space, and kept making wine. The bottlings that have followed are widely held to be the best of her career, which says a good deal about both the site and the winemaker.
