Description
“A great way to test drive the HanDrinksSolo Wine Club” — Han, while drinking solo.
Three reds made from three grapes that most South African wine lists don’t stock, by three producers who planted them anyway.
The club exists to send you wines you would not have found on your own, which is a lovely idea right up until you have to sign a monthly debit order for it. So this box runs the deal in reverse. You see the three wines first, you drink them, and then you decide whether we can be trusted with the rest. If we can’t, you have still had three very good bottles of wine, and there are worse ways to lose an argument.
Pilgrim Bastardo do Castello 2025
Bastardo do Castello is the South African name for Trousseau, the grape the Jura is famous for and Portugal calls Bastardo, and Pilgrim is the only producer in the country bottling it. Henry Kotzé made the first vintage in 2017 from sixty-six vines in the University of Stellenbosch’s experimental vineyard at Welgevallen, and he liked the result enough to plant four hundred more on a working farm on the Simonsberg. That is not a man still deciding whether he likes the grape. The wine is pale in the glass and nothing like thin, which is the whole argument for drinking it.
Sons of Sugarland Barbera 2024
Barbera is Piedmont’s everyday red, prized for bright acidity and soft tannin, and South Africa has never quite decided what to do with it: there was less Barbera planted in the country in 2021 than in 2011. Sons of Sugarland is a label from Saga, the project of Reenen Borman, Henk Kotze and Fritz Schoon, and this wine comes off a single Breedekloof vineyard of Goudini river pebbles and sandstone. It was picked in one pass, fermented as 100% whole bunches with eleven days on the skins, then pressed, aged in cement only and bottled without fining. Nothing in that recipe is there to hide the grape.
Lieben Tannat 2020
Tannat is the grape of Madiran in south-west France, and it is among the most tannic red grapes grown anywhere. Alwyn Liebenberg makes this one in Stellenbosch, and he says it needs at least five or six years in bottle before you open it. This is the 2020, so the wait is over. It pours almost black, smells of blackberry, liquorice, cloves and dried purple flowers, and the fruit lies over the tannin like velvet over a brick. It is a wine for red meat, and Alwyn will tell you so himself.
Drink them lightest to heaviest.
Pilgrim first, then the Barbera, then the Tannat, ideally across one evening with something on the braai by the time you reach the third. That gives you three grapes, three completely different ways of building a red wine, and a fair idea of what a month in the club looks like.
If you have been circling the wine club without committing, this is the low-risk way to find out what we do, and it makes a considerably better gift than whatever you were going to buy instead.
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