Sketch Cru Semillon 2022 (The Second that was First)
An unexpected wine recommendation from Wouter at Caroline's Wine Cellar. This Sketch Cru Semillon 2022 has been my favourite discovery of the year! "The name represents the wine being the second wine that was made but the first that went to bottle."
The Wine:
The entire room was perfumed by French toast grilled over an open fire and drizzled in honey and lemon: honeysuckle & orange blossoms, beeswax & thick honey, lemon curd, vanilla, nutmeg, toasted brioche and campfire smoke...juicy ripe sweet lemons, super ripe nectarines, meebos (salted dried apricots), and behind it all...lingering with the smoke, there’s fresh hay, chamomile and daisies.
The palate lives up to all of this hype: brandy fumes, grapefruit pith phenolics, herbal buchu, burnt sugar, sweet peaches, homemade lemonade made by your high school bestie from lemons that drop from her neighbour’s tree, sticky honey still attached to its comb and laced with traces of beeswax. Redundant, I know...but proof that the nose IS the palate and vice versa. Dry-ish, high acid, weightier bodied, high alcohol, and you bet your ass this finish is f’ing long...though, it’s herbal and bitter before it turns sweeter.
Vini + Viti:
100% Semillon planted on Argillaceous shale (silty shale and clay shale) planted 15 years ago on the South East facing slopes of Babylon Farm in the Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge.
The grapes were chilled overnight, the juice pressed the next day and settled fo 36 hours before being racked into two 500 litre oak barrels. It was left to slowly acclimatise to atmospheric temperature whereafter spontaneous fermentation occurred. After alcoholic fermentation, the wine was left on its gross lees for 8 months with minimal bâtonnage. The wine was stabilised and filtered before bottling.
"The idea behind the wine is to showcase a style of non-invasive winemaking and site expression. "
1230 bottles were made.
ALC 14.04 % | RS 3.13 g/L | TA 6.3 g/L | PH 3.3
Final thoughts:
Let’s put it this way: half a glass lasted an hour...followed by thinking about the wine for another hour...ending in anxiety that I’d only purchased one bottle. THAT's how much I enjoyed this wine.
Sketch Cru is a collaboration between two friends: Christo Kotze (the winemaker) and Malvin Wright (the artist). I have to take a moment to admire the soft fluffiness of those feathers contrasted with the way you can feel the sharpness of the beak...Malvin can draw! Also it's not often enough that I see embossing perfection...where the embossing adds to the art.
I half panicked when I saw the ochre yellow thumbprint on the label (thinking it was my turmeric stained fingers). Turns out the thumbprint is Christo’s signature, with Malvin’s artist signature on the left.
This wine is in the running for my best SA wine of the year!
