Lismore Estate Vineyards Pinot Noir 2022
£33.75
The wine
An elegant Pinot Noir delivering a complex bouquet of crushed rose petals, wild jasmine and fresh French herbs. The palate shows beautiful purity with layered red fruits, cranberry and raspberry, silky tannins and a long, savoury finish.
Pinot Noir demands cool conditions and gives nothing back when it does not get them, which is why so little of it succeeds in South Africa. The Cape South Coast is one of the few places it can work, and Greyton's altitude adds a further degree of cooling. Made with restraint rather than extraction, in a red-fruited, savoury register.
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.
