Now here’s a strange beast, a seriously tangy sweet white with a deliciously dry bite on the finish that is made from raisined Harslevelu grapes, the variety that is supposed to bring a linden leaf aroma to some of Hungary’s most interesting whites, including Tokaji. It’s made by old Cape hand Graham Knox and James McKenzie, who describes himself and his recently acquired South African wine estate Nabygelegen below the now-snowy Limietberg mountains in Wellington pictured here thus:
“I am a 37 year old South African retired investment banker ….worked in the mother city [I had to query this; he means London] for seven years and was spoilt rotten on great wines in great places……..so much so that I got out of the game, bought this wonderful peace of heaven and have been dirtying my hands for nearly five years. During my banking years I did a fair bit of trade in Budapest from London and made some friends including Tokaji….not that At the Limiet is a Tokaji, but at least I knew what the Old World had made with these grapes.
“After moving on to Nabygelegen (means ‘situated nearby’) and being fairly sure what our objective winewise was, I had a small vineyard of 1.25 ha of Harslevelu (which was producing massive crops for the local co op) with no idea what to do with it (not sure if you have seen the bunches but they are massive). So we started the idea of making a sweet ….I guess the process came from a desire to make something naturally sweet and complex but to give it a good natural acidity of its own. The brainstorming took place in an environment that if what we were doing did not work it would not matter, so we just ploughed ahead.”
What’s deeply unusual about this wine is that it is made with a nod to Tokaji from a mixture of verjus, the increasingly fashionable tart cooking ingredient that is the juice of unripe grapes picked around veraison (for acidity) and what they call vino cotto, the produce of successive berry-by-berry pickings (13 in this case, I’m told) of shrivelled grapes, the grapes ripening very unevenly on the five or six large bunches per vine. Says McKenzie:
“it really is a very labour-intensive and difficult operation. I have been lucky enough to experience some winemaking in far flung places but I haven’t seen anything as crazy as we are undertaking …… Basically, it’s made from 22 year old vines. The first harvest of two tons is made shortly after the verjus harvest in January with sugar at about 18 Balling [very similar to Brix], total acidity 9.5 and pH at 3.15. This first juice is pressed very gently and about 1,200 litres is stored at very low temperature in our grape store. We wait until more or less April and then begin harvesting well-desiccated fruit. This fruit is manually de-stemmed, placed in orange bags and then soaked in the early harvested juice over night releasing sugar, flavour and acid. Bags are removed, pressed and the essence [sic] added back to the cold juice. This process continues weekly until we reach the correct Balling of about 40, or we run out of raisins, or it rains.
“The now full flavoured sweet essence is placed in 225 litre French barrels and left to spontaneously ferment with whichever wild yeast we have in the [Bovlei] valley. Two rackings, cold stabilization and bottling. That’s about it …….. I am sure you get similar stories regularly but I had to pass it on.
“Nabygelegen is a 300 year-old farm with a cellar dating back to 1748 which we are pretty sure would have been making sweeter wines in it early years. Although we produce dry wines in the main, this natural sweet is in homage to the early history. The name comes from the Limietberg mountain range on which these grapes grow.”
I hadn’t heard of Nabygelegen and was sent a range of McKenzie’s wines to try by a new UK importer specializing in South African wines, Step Up Wines of Enborne, Berkshire (www.stepupwines.co.uk). I found the acidity on the dry whites a bit jagged to my taste but I was very intrigued by this wine which seemed much better balanced – extremely naturally refreshing. It’s sold in half-litre bottles (from a mere eight barrels total) and is being offered by Step Up at a fair £12.99 a half-litre considering all the work that goes into it.
Here’s the analysis for technohounds:
Alcohol : 14.5
Residual Sugar : 55g/l
Total Acid : 5.4 g/l
pH : 3.66
And here’s a list of Nabygelegen’s importers worldwide for those who’d like to try to get their hands on this wine.
The particularly dry 2003 vintage may mean that this particular wine is an exception, but it’s a fascinating wine – drier, lighter and less obviously acid than a Tokaji, but also much less expensive. It’s a wine that would be as enjoyable on a cold night in the southern hemisphere (McKenzie told me it was 4 deg C there yesterday when he took the picture of the Limietberg mountains above) as it was outside under the chestnut trees one evening here in the Languedoc recently.
I commend to everyone other than McKenzie White Lightning, Justin Cartwright's tale of a South African returning from London to take over a doomed old wine farm on the Cape.
