Lismore Estate Vineyards Estate Reserve Syrah 2022
£54.75
The wine
The Lismore Estate Reserve Syrah is elegant, perfumed and bright, with notes of white pepper, classic garrigue and the perfumed floral note of crushed violets. Light and graceful yet structured, this is a crystal-clear expression of extreme cool-climate Syrah.
The Estate Reserve Syrah comes from the Greyton home vineyards at around 300 metres. Cool sites give Syrah its most interesting form: less weight, more perfume and a distinctly peppery character that comes from rotundone, an aromatic compound that develops in cooler growing conditions and is largely lost in the heat.
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.
