Top image: Danielle Coetsee
Boschendal, the iconic Cape winery situated in the Groot Drakenstein Valley, has added a new white wine to its range, affirming the winery’s commitment to site-specific winemaking as well as honouring the early pioneers of the South African wine industry who founded Boschendal in 1685.
The wine, a white Bordeaux-style blend of Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc, is named Boschendal Suzanne and pays tribute to Suzanne de Lanoy, the wife of Boschendal’s French Huguenot founder Nicolas de Lanoy who landed at the Cape in 1685 after fleeing religious persecution in his motherland.
The first vintage of Boschendal Suzanne is from the 2019 vintage and has a core of Sémillon which comprises 54% of the wine, with the balance made from Sauvignon Blanc. Both varieties were sourced from selected parcels in the high-lying regions of Elgin, the Cape’s pre-eminent cool-climate wine region.
According to Danielle Coetsee, the winemaker responsible for white wines and Cap Classique at Boschendal, white Bordeaux-style blends is one of South Africa’s most revered and exciting wine categories. Thus, the Boschendal team had gone to extreme lengths over the past few years to realise its vision of crafting an elegant and refined blend of Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc that forms one holistic whole of true excellence.
“With its cool, maritime climate and ancient soils of shale, decomposed granite and clay, Elgin showed to be the ideal region to deliver grapes expressing the visceral nuances of these two noble white varieties,” says Coetsee. “The slow-ripening of the fruit, a result of the lower Elgin temperatures, leads to high natural acidity and low pH in the grapes. These features are important in allowing expressive varietal characters in the wines, but also to ensure complexity as well as ageing potential, something classic white wine blends such as these should have.”
Hand-picked in the crisp coolness of the early Elgin mornings, the grapes were transported to Boschendal’s winery in Groot Drakenstein. Here, the first step was to do meticulous bunch-sorting to ensure overall purity and health of the wine’s foundation.
The Sauvignon Blanc component was given brief skin-contact before pressing to elevate the structural components of the variety. The Sauvignon Blanc was fermented in tank with a cultivar-specific yeast strain before going in older 500L oak barrels for approximately 6 months, while the Sémillon was allowed to begin spontaneous fermentation in tank before the wine was inoculated to complete the ferment, the latter stages occurring in 500 litre oak barrels, consisting of fourth, fifth and sixth fills.
The Semillon spent 11months in barrel whilst the Sauvignon only spent 6 months on fine lees. Once each variety had reached the desired degree of complexity in mouth-feel, palate weight and fruit expression, the Boschendal team set about compiling the final blend.
“Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc are, on their own, two totally different wines with their own flavour-profiles and nuances,” says Coetsee. “Sauvignon Blanc is bright and mineral, while Sémillon has a sterner, waxy complexity. But bring them together, and they form a harmonious whole – as if the two varieties were made for one another.
“We are enormously pleased with the result of this Suzanne Bordeaux-style blend which is the result of vineyard sites comprising of the ideal geographical factors for allowing the two varieties to express themselves. And by bringing them together after a relaxed and slow period of wood maturation Boschendal believes we have delivered a beautifully statuesque white wine of which Suzanne de Lanoy and all the pioneers of Boschendal will feel proud.”
