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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 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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👃🏼 The vanguard carries pronounced green rocket leaf over sweeter, lighter, more floral, lavender. Around those herbs and flowers, there’s also very clean white pepper spice, and a touch of black olive. Any sweetness on The nose expresses itself as a sort of blackberry element, but it’s certainly not fruit forward.
👄 The palate is medium-light, in the style of St Josef in the Northern Rhone. Tannins are also quite fine, fairly silky, couching some really lovely fruit elements that weren’t detected on the nose. There are brighter red cherry hints and touches of raspberry, along with deeper, sweeter blackberries. Over all of that, there’s a rather pervasive, salty, black olive brine element in there, which makes it a glorious companion to some Mediterranean tapas, if that sort of thing floats your boat.

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🔬 Wine of origin Cape Agulhas. 100% Syrah. Fruit hand harvested from two different blocks on Lomond Estate. Grapes were fermented in open-top fermenters with 30% of each block being kept as whole clusters. Treatment was very gentle with only one punchdown per day to keep the cap wet. Fermentation began spontaneously, and took roughly ten days to complete. The parcels were then pressed into older 250l and 300 litre French oak barrels, where they stayed for 10 months. Wines underwent malolactic conversion in barrel. Wine had another 10 months of bottle rest prior to release.