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#348 De Krans Tritonia Verdelho 2022

#348 De Krans Trintonia Verdelho 2022 bottle (500 x 800)

TECHNICAL SPECS

🔬 Wine of Origin Calitzdorp. 100% Verdelho. Winemaker: Christoff de Wet.

Fruit is harvested from vineyards planted in 2015, on the riverbanks of the Gamka River. The soils consist of red clay, and the vines are very low yielding. The vines are Perold-trellised and run east-west to reduce direct sun-exposure.

Grapes are harvested towards the end of January. In the cellar, they are crushed, removed from skins, and cool-fermented. The wine is matured on its fine lees in 3rd and 4th-fill barrels for roughly 12 months.

Alc 14.0% | pH 3.32 | Tot Acid 6.2 | Res Sugar 3.1g/l |

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Brave New World

Verdelho is undoubtedly native to Portugal. But by the early 1900s it had achieved the status of “most planted white cultivar in all of Australia”!

It was first brought to the country by two men – James Busby and John MacArthur. Busby was a British citizen who planted the very first Vitis vinifera vines in Australia, and is widely considered to be the father of Australian wine, and John MacArthur – for his part – was the founder of Australia’s very first commerical winery, Camden park Estate.

Now both these men operated in New South Wales – and the verdelho they brought in was mostly used in fortified wines – but out

on the West coast – Verdelho was appreciated not only for how

disease resistant and drought resistant it was, but also because it made some delicious and age-worthy still wines.

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Arrival in Africa

It was these West Coast wines that Simonsig’s Frans Malan tasted when he visited Aus the late 1980s, and they impressed him so much that by 1996 he had successfully imported the grape,

taken it through quarantine, and planted South Africa’s first Verdelho vineyard.

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In Modern Times

That 1996 vineyard is still alive and well, and is being used in a fascinating new range of wines from Simonsig that celebrate South Africa’s viticulture connection to the wine grapes of the Mediterranean.

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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 on the wine in the bottle:

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TASTING NOTES

👃🏼 Honey suckle florals, zested mandarin, a touch of queen pineapple, some sea spray, vanilla spice and white pepper.

👄 The palate opens with sweeter elements of tinned peaches and some homemade lemonade, but these are very quickly balanced by a delightfully textured meyer lemon pith elements that emerge, joined on tail by spicy touches of white pepper and salted apricots on the tail.

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Detangling Verdelho vs Verdello vs Verdejo