The name on the label is Swansong, and a swansong is supposed to arrive just before the funeral. In 2024 that was the honest title for this wine. The Riesling block on the farm Alhambra, high on the Ceres Plateau, had lost its grape-buying contract, and a vineyard with no buyer is a vineyard with a date for the bulldozer. Winemaker Etienne Louw made one wine from it as a farewell.

Then the farewell went wrong, in the best possible way. Etienne loved what came out of the cellar and committed to buying more fruit. Other winemakers queued up behind him, and by the end of 2025 the block had more demand than it could supply.

This is proper mountain country. Vineyards in the region climb towards a thousand metres and the peaks around them take snow in winter, which is how South Africa ended up with a ski jacket stitched into the lining of its beach shorts. That cold is the reason the wine tastes the way it does, and this is the story of how a bottle of wine saved the vineyard that made it.

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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The Riesling comes off a block of about three hectares on the farm Alhambra, on the Ceres Plateau, where vineyards in the region reach around a thousand metres and the mountains behind them take snow in winter. Those cold conditions are the entire point. Malic acid falls away as grapes ripen and heat speeds that loss, so a cool mountain season lets the ripeness build without spending all of the acidity.

Etienne Louw trained as an engineer before he studied winemaking, and the cellar work shows it. The grapes are picked very early, while it is still bitterly cold up on the plateau, and moved from Ceres to Stellenbosch as fast as possible. They are pressed immediately, with no skin contact or soak at all, which keeps the bitter compounds in the skins out of the juice and goes some way to explaining the wine’s quieter, purer nose. The juice then settles cold for about two days. He ferments with a selected yeast rather than a wild population, preferring to take yeast out as a variable and let the fruit carry the difference between one vintage and the next.

The label illustration was drawn by hand and printed by letterpress. It was a runner-up for design and packaging at the Drinks Business Awards in 2020, and the wine earned 4.5 stars in the 2026 Platter’s Guide along with 92 points from James Suckling.