A passionate trio create an exceptional wine

After Chile and Portugal, I was quite keen to do a third harvest in a year on a new continent. Australia and New Zealand were not an option because of the distance. So South Africa became an obvious choice: while on the same latitude as Chile, vintage takes place much earlier.

Through mutual friends, I came to meet Lowell Jooste whose family initiated at Klein Constantia the renaissance of the mythical Vin de Constance that Napoleon enjoyed during his exile on St Helena Island.

If the site of Constantia, on the eastern slopes of Constantiaberg, is very favorable to the production of fine white wines, it is not quite warm enough for reds. As early as 1998, Lowell replanted Cabernet and Syrah on his Anwilka vineyard at Stellenbosch.

Anwilka has a very original terroir with a complex soil made of quartz debris mixed with an iron matrix. The combination of this poor soil and the proximity to False Bay and its maritime winds helps produce wines with a certain power and warmth while keeping the finesse to which I am so attached to. I quite like the idea of a Cabernet-Syrah blend, all the more so that Louis d’Estournel used to grow successfully Syrah next to Cabernet at Cos in the 19th century.

Hubert de Boüard, who took his Château Angélus to the 1st Growth rank in Saint-Emilion, was also very interested by the terroir of Stellenbosch and our partnership with Lowell started very naturally indeed.

2005 is the birth year of ANWILKA, followed in 2006 by ugaba, also a Syrah blend but from younger vines.
In 2009, the construction of a new winery better suited to the specificities of our vineyard, has enabled us to redefine our range and thus create a new wine AmododA (a Cabernet blend).

Bruno Prats