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Friends on a mission

Samesyn Wines is an exciting new producer made up of a small team of wine adventurers from Stellenbosch. The team consists of Lawyer Sarah Marx, and Canadian Marketing Consultant Kara Hobby, joining forces with Jono Le Feuvre (the “Han” in HanDrinksSolo). The name Samesyn means “Togetherness”, but perhaps a more complete sense of the idea is “a sense of community created by a common goal”; in this instance the goal of exploring emerging regions, and unusual cultivars, and expressing them in liquid form.

If you have yet to sign up for your Monthly HanDrinksSolo Wine Subscription then you’ll have to hunt this wine down in your own time. But until then, here are my tasting notes and some technical specs.

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👃🏼 A fairly generous nose of Blackberry fruit, white pepper, some sweeter blueberry elements, and dusting of redder cherry notes.

👄 On the palate there is oodles of fresh blackberry fruit, which is interspersed with bursts of that same white pepper that we noted on the nose. The fruit manages to be persistent, but without appearing heavy. In fact, the whole affair is rather light-footed. Tannins are fairly innocuous, but just enough to keep the riper fruit elements upright.

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Wine of Origin Cape Agulhas. 100% Syrah.

Grapes were dosed with very low levels of sulphur on arrival at the cellar (40ppm), before being inoculated with a multi-strained natural yeast. Fermentation took place over 10 days in open-top fermenters. 30% of the grapes were whole-bunch pressed, with the remainder being destemmed and crushed. Punchdowns took place once per day; just enough to keep the cap wet. After fermentation, the juice was racked to tank, settled, and then transferred to neutral oak barrels. Malolactic conversion commenced spontaneously, and the wine was allowed to mature in barrel for 10 months.

Wine was racked and lightly filtered prior to bottling.

Alcohol 13.5% | pH: 3.72 | Total Acid: 4.9g/litre | Residual Sugar: 1.8 g/litre.