Pilgrim Bastardo do Castello 2025 (No.505)

by | Oct 22, 2026 | One minute waffles | 0 comments

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#505 Pilgrim Bastardo do Castello 2025

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Pilgrim Bastardo do Castello 2025 bottle
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Nebbiolo and Olivia Rodrigo have the same problem: both look, at first glance, like a watered-down version of the truth. Spend ten minutes with either one and you find out how badly you set your own expectations. This wine is the third name on that list.

Bastardo do Castello, which is Trousseau in its native Jura and the Bastard of the Castle in Portuguese, arrived in South Africa as sixty-six surviving vines in the University of Stellenbosch’s experimental vineyard at Welgevallen. Henry Kotzé and his wife Riëtte, a viticulturist, found them. Their first vintage, 2017, made about a hundred and fifty bottles, and it was the country’s first commercial varietal bottling of the grape.

Ten harvests later, Henry knows things the textbook doesn’t. The book says Trousseau needs a warm, exposed site to ripen and rots inside its own tightly packed bunches. Here it ripens absurdly early, at the pace of a warm-sited Sauvignon Blanc, which on a red grape is genuinely disorienting. It wants very little water, and it shrugs off powdery mildew. At the end of 2021 he put four hundred more vines in the ground on a working farm. Sixty-six plants became a bet.

But of course, 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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TASTING NOTES

Aromas: Lovely and open: red cherry, white pepper, orange sherbet, oreganum and raspberry candy, with a light musk-candy sweetness to the perfume set against a savoury, mushroomy earthiness. Most of that is a roll call of classic Trousseau. Red cherry is the grape’s centre of gravity, the pepper is partly the grape and partly the whole-bunch ferment with the stems left in, and mushroom belongs to the slightly feral side you find in Jura examples. The orange sherbet and the musk candy are less textbook. Those read as this wine’s own fingerprint, quite possibly made during fermentation.

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Palate: Immediately vivid. Intensely bright sour cherry and tart cranberry, carried on very fine tannins. It feels light, razor sharp and exceptionally clean, and the acidity gives it definition rather than hardness. Those tannins are doing exactly what the stems asked of them: whole-bunch fermentation builds structure, and gentle foot stomping with an early press kept it fine rather than turning it into agricultural sandpaper. The finish lingers on tart cranberry and keeps everything brisk and mouthwatering. Remarkably close to the Jura fingerprint, but that bright, filigree, razor-clean delivery isn’t a copy. It’s a high-definition Stellenbosch translation.

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TECHNICAL SPECS

A small vineyard on a north-east-facing hill on the slopes of Stellenbosch Mountain, on decomposed red-brown granite: rich but well drained, which makes small, flavour-packed berries and deeply coloured juice. Hand-harvested and placed whole-bunch into small open-top bins, gently foot-stomped, then fermented naturally and slowly with daily punch-downs. Pressed after about a week into small neutral French oak barrels to finish fermenting, matured fourteen months with gentle rackings between barrels, and bottled unfiltered, so a little sediment or crystal in the bottle is part of the deal. The 2025 is still largely those original sixty-six vines, with a second small contribution from the four hundred planted at the end of 2021.

Alc. 14% | Acid 5.7 g/L | pH 3.63 |
Sugar and sulfur not published by the estate.

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