Winemaker Notes

Mick & Jeanine are thankful to continue with this vineyard they have worked with since 2017 called ‘Rustenhof.’ This great farm in the Faure area has an abundance of lovely Cinsaut, amongst many other varieties and Pieter Bredell, with Jeanine’s assistance and direction, farms it with great care. The block the Cravens use is a dryland, bush-vine block, only three miles from the ocean and essentially planted on granitic sand, suiting their winemaking style nicely. Mick emphasizes the massive difference in this vineyard since the 2017 vintage as the Cravens along with Pieter’s son, Bernhard, have been farming it organically and getting as much nutrient matter into the vineyard with use of winter cover crops and chicken manure.  Mick calls the 2023 a heady, perfumed, bright red with “big aromatics and crunchy red fruits.” Keeping in line with previous releases and straying from the other reds the Cravens make, the Cinsaut grapes are destemmed before fermentation due to the natural low acidity and higher pH compared to other red varieties.

The fruit was hand-harvested and fully destemmed then placed into concrete tanks. Gentle pumpovers and light punch downs are performed 1- 2 times a day throughout fermentation, and the resulting wine was pressed after a week back to concrete tanks for maturation. It is bottled slightly earlier than their other red wines in an effort to express the fresher, brighter characters of Cinsaut, so after seven months the wine was bottled with a light fining, sheet filtration, and dosage of 49 ppm dosage of sulfur.