#381 Mount Abora Saffraan Cinsaut

RELEVANT LINKS:

HANtv EPISODE CHAPTER INDEX:

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00:00 – The Wine of the Day
00:51 – Intro to Mount Abora Wines
01:40 – The SA Cinsaut Archives
02:44 – Winemaker Krige Visser and his Cinsaut Love Affair
03:40 – The History Surrounding the legendary Safraan Cinsaut
04:06 – The Legend of Kubla Khan and Mount Abora
04:51 – The Controversy surrounding Mount Abora
05:16 – Tasting notes for the Mount Abora Safraan Cinsaut
06:07 – Some Wine and Poetry Pairing suggestions
06:30 – Videos that explain the rich history of South African Cinsaut
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Meet the Mount Abora Revolutionaries

Mount Abora is a wine project started by Krige and his business partner, Pieter De Waal, and the way Krige describes their partnership is that he is the intuitive party, while Pieter is the voice of reason. Pieter, incidentally, is also a incredibly gifted blind wine taster, and is a regular feature in the South African Wine Tasting Championships Top Ten.
The project of Mount Abora wines is named after a mountain in Samuel Taylor coleridge’s famous poem, Kubla Khan, and the first vintage of the Saffraan was back in 2012 in the decade following what was an unprecedented rediscovery of cinsault as cultivar of quality.
This video covers the Mount Abora Cinsaut, and also talks a little about the birth of South Africa’s Cinsaut Revival. Now, 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:

TASTING NOTES

👃🏼 A kaleidescope of pink peppercorns, wild flowers, coriander seeds, a hint of savoury game, and loads of cherry candy.
👄 The palate opens with a light, bright, spicy, burst of raspberries, pepper, and cherries; followed by a lovely grippy pithy finish, which takes one into blood orange country.
On the tail there are also some deeper hints of herbal fennel, which lend some gravity to what had been a rather ethereal affair up until then. A really love example of what Cinsault should be.

TECHNICAL SPECS

🔬 Wine of Origin Western Cape. 100% Cinsaut. The fruit is sourced old vine grapes from Malmesbury and Breedekloof, vinified by winemaker Krige Visser.
Grapes were picked at 21°B, and crushed through a peristaltic pump, before being pushed into PVC bins, where they fermented naturally on skins and stalks. After five days of fermenting, it was pressed into 530 liter Zeppelin PVC eggs. It was racked before bottling ten 10 months after fermentation.
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