HANtv Episode CHAPTER INDEX:

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TASTING NOTES

Aromas: What a crazy, pretty nose. Pristine, pure raspberry candy — full fairground raspberry sherbet, with the gleam of toffee-apple coating catching the sun. But it doesn’t strand you in fairyland for long. Underneath comes something far more elegant: purple flowers, violet maybe, a smudge of red rose, a sweet herbal lift like lavender leaf. Then an earthier puff — terracotta, potting soil — grounding the whole thing. That candied lift is the carbonic-maceration Mourvèdre talking. This wine sees fifteen months of oak and you’d never know; the primary fruit is completely untouched, which is remarkable for a wine roughly five years from harvest with no great wall of tannin doing the preserving.

Palate: Johan Malan was chasing a lighter-framed, lower-alcohol red, and that phrase usually makes me flinch — South Africa has a long, sad history of selling thin, hollow wines as “light”. This is not that. This is light on its feet like a cat burglar. Underneath there’s pure sour red cherry folding into the sweeter candy, with a lovely bittersweet, chewy texture — cherry skin, citrus pith. The tannins are gloriously fine and evenly applied, like a thin patina laid right across the back of the palate, letting nothing slip past too juicy or too easy. Just enough structure to lift the finish, which is frankly the only thing standing between you and finishing the bottle in one unsupervised sitting. That textured little pause makes you stop and reconsider — and the finish lingers, vivid and bright, all clean red cherry and raspberry.

TECHNICAL SPECS