Angus Paul Hespers Straw Wine Chenin Blanc/Muscat 2021 37,5cl

Angus Paul Straw Wine Chenin Blanc (60%) / Muscat (40%) 

Kleur: donkergeel met een gouden gloed
Geur: intense geur, gelijk heel open en heel fruitig, gedroogde abrikoos, zeste, muscatdruifjes en bloemenhoning
Smaak: heel rijk, prachtig zoet in balans met voldoende frisheid, earl grey en gedroogd fruit.
Houdbaar: op dronk, minimaal houdbaar tot 2035
Lekker bij: laat op de avond zonder eten, pittige blauwe kaas, citroencake

TASTING NOTES by Angus:
Lucious and exotic. The nose burst with notes of burnt orange, dried apricot, muscat raisins and honey. The palate is rich and sweet, moving all over the palate. Intense notes of apricot and black tea always stick out to us. Though sweet, the wine finishes with a fresh twang as the acidity clears up all remnants of sweetness.

Platter’s ****(*)  92/100
Straw wine from Stellenbosch chenin (60%) & Robertson muscadel well blended; 6 months in old barrel & glass demijohn. 2021 honeyed citrus & stonefruit with a herbal tang on the rich, sweet palate & a lingering apricot finish. Clean-cut & grippy. Alc 9.4%; 275 g/L sugar balanced by firm acidity. 375 ml.

WINEMAKING
Grapes are hand picked at ‘normal ripeness’ (21.5 balling) and cooled overnight. After this, they were placed upon a wooden drying rack in direct sunlight. For the next 4 weeks the grapes were dried and shriveled by the sun, until about 50% of the volume was lost, resulting in doubling of sugar, acid and flavour concentration.
Grapes were then pressed for 4 days to extract the most concentrated of grape syrup. Following this the juice fermented for 6 months in glass demi-johns. Once the alcohol level raised to about 10% the yeast gave up fermentation and a lovely amount of residual sugar (RS 275.5) was left.

THE NAME
Vespers are an old term for evening prayers in Catholicism; vesper comes from the Greek “hesper” which means the evening. Hesperia was a garden in Greecian mythology guarded by the Nymphs of the Evening, protecting golden fruit within. This all seemed to fit the character of this wine – sweet wine being such an end-of-the-night drink, its viscosity connoting the evening’s last rays of sunlight, the last sips of wine almost like an evening prayer.

Nectar, Estus, Golden Orbs of Hesperia. This small production bottling currently uses two vineyards, one in the Polkadraai Hills supplying the Chenin blanc portion of the wine (60%). The other, an old block planted in 1959 in Robertson produces the Muscat blanc (de Frontignan) portion (40%).