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#380 Radford Dale THIRST Clairette Blanche 2024

TASTING NOTES

👃🏼 Bees wax, gravel dust, some gentle floral notes, like baby’s breath flowers.
👄 Palate is delightfully chewy. Almost like tropical melon rind, and I say melon rind, because it isn’t sweet, but it has that melon texture to it. And there’s a saltiness in there, too. And nectarine, and some really lovely citrus acidity which keeps everything feeling quite juicy. The finish does have lingering lemon candy notes, but – for the most part, it is about more of that waxy texture.

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Bonnie and Clyde; Radford and Dale

Radford Dale is a partnership between Ben Radford from Barossa, valley, Australia, and Alex Dale from Burgundy. Now, Ben had been in Boras and his family been farming there for five generations, and Dale had been making wine and working a village since he was 15 in Burgundy, and they both descended upon Stellenbosch, which I guess is kind of A both literal and metaphorical and philosophical middle ground for initially, the Radford Dale label would buy grapes from a lot of other producers to make their wines:
Swartland fruit for their reds.
Elgin for their Pinot and Stellenbosch for their Chards…
But while their cellar is in Stellies they have bought now a property in Elgin. It was Elgin ridge which made some really very special Chardonnay, but it is now called Radford.
There organics, and the focus for them there is Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Really.
They’ve always been fairly progressive with regards to the way that they farmed and regenerative viticulture, and now they have reliable access to all of their own organic certified fruit.

Now you might have noticed Radford dale are certainly not shy of being niche in that this first range made of two wines. One is the game noir, which at the time, was the only game noir in the entire country. And the second bottling is the first Clare Blanche, which, as we said before, they really are not a lot of. So as we asked earlier, what is the allure that Clare Blanche has that keeps drawing people back to it.

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TECHNICAL SPECS

🔬 Wine of Origin Stellenbosch. 100% Clairette Blanche. The grapes are sourced from the crunchy, decomposed granite soil of the Polkadraai area in Stellenbosch. Although the actual age of the vines is unknown, one look at their gnarled structure will confirm their veteran status. The sprawling growth pattern is supported by only one foliage wire and so the bunches ripen in relatively shady conditions.
The grapes are harvested by hand and then hand sorted, to ensure only the purest, healthiest fruit is used. The grapes are then de-stemmed and crushed, but instead of immediate pressing and separation of the juice from the skins the juice is left to macerate on the skins for a few hours. This builds some texture and palate weight in the wine and imparts an interesting pithy note.
Just before alcoholic fermentation kicks off, the wine is pressed and transferred to stainless steel vats for spontaneous natural fermentation. The wine is bottled without fining or filtration to preserve every nuance of its varietal and terroir expression.
| Alc 12.5% | pH 3.60 | TA 4.6g/l | RS 1.6g/l

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