May de Lencquesaing was born in Bordeaux, grew up among her family’s wine estates and inherited Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande in 1978. In 2003, aged 78, she bought a fruit farm called Glenelly on the lower slopes of the Simonsberg in Stellenbosch and set about replacing the orchards with vines.

 

The Glass Collection range is named for her other lifelong passion. Glenelly’s museum holds about 600 pieces of glass art spanning roughly 2,000 years, and the objects on the labels come from her own collection.

 

This bottle is 100% Cabernet Franc, a grape that makes up just 7% of the estate’s Lady May 2021 blend and gets the whole stage here. It also comes from the Luke O’Cuinneagain era at Glenelly. Luke joined in 2008 and moved to Vergelegen in 2022, Dirk van Zyl succeeded him and has just become head winemaker at Kanonkop, and Lehandri Bothma now leads the Glenelly cellar. The video will follow that run of winemakers through one estate, and ask why this Cabernet Franc was worth bottling on its own.

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My tasting notes for this wine will be added here when the video goes live.

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Simonsberg, Stellenbosch, and 100% Cabernet Franc. Glenelly describes 2021 as a cooler, longer ripening season, with budbreak about 14 days late and harvest roughly two weeks later than in 2020. The grapes were destemmed and lightly crushed into stainless-steel tanks and fermented naturally with indigenous yeasts, with two pump-overs a day and a further two to three weeks on the skins after fermentation. Malolactic fermentation took place naturally in 300-litre French oak barrels, where the wine spent 12 months, a small percentage of the oak being new. Production was 16,800 bottles.
Alc. 14.5% | Sugar 2.0 g/L | Acid 5.7 g/L | pH 3.54 |