#494 Smiley Fresh White V2 NV
Video coming soon. The film for this bottle is still in production. Everything else is already here — the story, the notes and the numbers — and the video drops into this spot the moment it goes live.
COMING SOON ON HANtv
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All of the above is exactly how this wine was made. And it is one of the most delicious things I have put in my mouth all year.
Chris Groenewald has been a barman, a sommelier, an importer, and three times captain of South Africa’s international blind tasting team. He does not make wine on a rolling estate with a manor house and a pair of hunting hounds. He makes it in a warehouse in Parow. Less Chateau Lafite, more Bond villain lair with a basket press.
Smiley Fresh White is seven grapes and two vintages, building toward a solera. And the label is a sheep’s head, because a smiley is a braaied sheep’s head, so called because the lips retract into a grin. The wines are little bits of off-cuts put together, and the label is that pun made visible. This is episode one of Crossing the Fault Line.
TASTING NOTES
Aromas: Right up front, bright fresh citrus: sliced oranges and a lick of lemon curd, the fruit at its most innocent and the part Chris left well alone. Get your nose properly in and something richer sits underneath — dried orange peel, a touch of honey, a kind of baked warmth. That is the sun: a portion of this wine is baked outdoors, sun wine, gently cooking and concentrating the fruit the way the sun turns a grape into a raisin. And behind it, the flor — a living veil of yeast grown right across the surface, exactly as they do it for sherry in Spain, leaving sotolon behind. Sotolon is the maple, curry, burnt sugar molecule that lives in Vin Jaune and old sherry, and now, apparently, in a bottle from Parow.
Palate: First thing that lands is a bright, cidery tang — a little bruised apple, the nice end of apple cider vinegar. That is oxygen, and the acetaldehyde it leaves behind: the smell of a good fino, and the thing that makes this taste alive instead of tired. Then right at the death, a lovely drying grip. Pithy, mouth-puckering, like biting into a quince. That is skin contact, handing a white wine a whisper of tannin so it grips like a red. Sun, flor, oxygen, skins — every wrong answer in the quiz sitting in one glass, and somehow it works. One tip: fridge-cold it stays shut. Give it a few minutes and the citrus turns to nectarine. Chris made a wine with moods. Let it have them.
TECHNICAL SPECS
Alc. 11.5% | Sugar, acid, pH and sulfur are not published.
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