One Bottle Three Questions - A Wine Podcast
Small growers to large co-ops from all over the world.
Viticulture, winemaking, sales and branding.
Real-life examples.
We drink one bottle. We ask three questions.
One Bottle Three Questions - A Wine Podcast
#1 - 2023 Salt River, Savage with Duncan Savage
Duncan Savage talks about how to source grapes, what he learned from Didier Dagueneau, and how understanding oxidation and reduction helps him make the Sauvignon he wants to drink.
Mike - Hello, and welcome to A Bottle and Three Questions with myself, Mike Best, and Nelson Pari. So today we're drinking the 2023 Salt River with the man himself, Duncan Savage from Savage Wines. And we're gonna hand over to Nelson with question one.
Nelson - Hi Duncan, so Salt River comes from vineyards that you don't own. Could you walk us through the process from finding a vineyard that you like to negotiating a contract with the owner?
Duncan - Firstly, boys, Mike, Nelson, thank you for having me. It's really good to do these kind of things and it's always super cool for us. I'm sitting here in good old, I don't want to say sunny South Africa because we're going into winter and it's pretty sunny. It's, weather's always good, yeah? But it's super cool, you know, when we do these kinds of things and you get to see who's drinking the wines around the world and you get a bit of an idea. You know, we travel so much, but it's so cool to see where the wines are being served, you know, all the different restaurants around the world and the different people that are looking at the wines. It's amazing. So just to give you an idea. So the question obviously was grapes, eh, Nelson?
Nelson - Yeah, it's like literally the whole process from finding the vineyard to negotiating the contract with the owner.
Duncan - So, South Africa is a little more complicated than what people understand a lot of the time, I think. So what we've had in the last couple of years is obviously this resurgence of growers. We went from that old school state mentality, you had to have this fancy, massive long driveway and this big fancy winery and all of that. And these days, the dynamic has changed a lot. I mean, we've got this scenario now where all these guys, you can buy grapes, you can rent cellar space. We're not governed by as many strict rules as what Europe is governed by. But what we do have a challenge with is that I can't just go like you can go in Spain or Italy. I don't quite know how it works in Italy, but I know obviously in France and Spain, you can literally go and buy a vineyard. If you've got enough cash and you want to buy that vineyard, you can buy it. I used to use the example of you can go buy a vineyard in Burgundy, but we all know no one can afford that anyway. So it doesn't really matter. But the thing is that, you know, with... With the vineyards in South Africa, we've got a thing. There was an Act in 1970, Act 70 of 1970. And what that did was it set out to do a good thing. It set out to protect agricultural land. So what they deemed at the time to be a sustainable agricultural entity is how they apportioned a lot of the farms. So Act 70 of 1970 is very much still in effect, and we can't change that. We can. maybe with lots of money and lots of lawyers, but there's many people have tried it. I mean, I was actually surfing with Eben Sadie this morning. Eben's done a bit of work on it. We've got a whole lot of applications with the departments of agriculture now. It's very difficult. So we are trying to get these guys to understand that the model of the estate that's happened in South Africa for so many years, where guys wanna have, like I say, the driveway, the vineyard, the fancy house, all that kind of stuff, you don't need it. I don't wanna... I don't want to build another structure on the land we're leasing. I just want to own vineyards, you know? That's like our thing. So the way we're doing it at the moment is, and this is now on the Savage front, so Salt River, we're buying fruit because it's still quite a new product in our range, or new wine in our range, did I say? And then the Savage range, that we're a lot more solidified with the growers we've worked with. So there we've got long-term arrangements. So we've got anything between 10 and 30 year lease arrangements on those properties. So we started in the beginning just buying the fruit and making the wine. And it was easy for us because the barrier to entry was quite small. And now we're at a point where you guys know the deal. I mean, we exist in a world of variables. Everything we do from the climate through the season, soil health, all that kind of stuff, we can control it to a point, but most of it’s variable. Whereas The one thing you can do is we want to, you know, in the winery, there's a few things you can control, but there's still a lot of variables. But the thing is in the vineyards, we want to control every single thing we can. And if you leave something up to other people, they're not going to do it to the way you want to do it. We have a specific way we do it. So with all the savage wines, the range of smaller production wines, we're farming all of those vineyards ourselves, or at least should I say 85% of them. And we do everything from pruning to all the canopy management. You know, everything that needs to be done, we focusing on in those parcels. Salt river is a little bit different because we've only been making salt river for a couple of years now. So we trying to get to the point where we can understand all the blocks we're working with. We've established that what we wanna do is we wanna work in Stellenbosch. And I think that a lot of people, and you know, I worked at Cape Point for a long time years ago, we were sort of maritime, you know, cooler sites. Everyone at the time was looking for these cool A lot of Sauvignon, you guys know the deal, it's tried to emulate Kiwi Sauvignon for years and years and years. There's so much of that on the market. With salt river, we're not trying to do that. Basically the vineyards we went to look for was everything the textbook said do, we went the opposite. Instead of finding southerly slopes in cool areas, we went to Stellenbosch and we went to the northern, like northerly slopes where generally guys are planting Cabernet, Cabernet Franc, things like that. The idea was to not have any form of greenness. but also try and break away from that very thirly style, that very poppy upfront aromatic style. So most of the vineyards are on granite as well. So at least 60% is on granite. There's a little bit of shale, but most of it's on granite. And it's also sites that we can get, we know they're really good sites and it's slightly bigger parcels that we can grow the wine because Salt River started pretty small. and I was just going to the UK and it was, I mean, you know, Damon obviously very well, Damon for years was on my case. Come on, Duncan, we need a Sauvignon that's accessible at price point and we can get it by the glass in restaurants. And I was always like, we're not doing it, we're not doing it. And then eventually we gave it and we did it. And I'm so stoked we did because the wines just come along, you know, beautifully, you know, like the way we work in terms of warmer slopes, very oxidative handling of the juice. All that kind of thing is kind of like by default given us this quite saline mineral style which obviously kind of fits the name. So yeah, so that's the thing is looking for parcels that are not overly vigorous, that have, you know, I like the granite influence. I like the fact that we can, you know, we've got high solar radiation sites. We're breaking a lot of the canopy open. We're getting ripe yellow fruit coming into the winery and then we're just processing it very basically from there.
Nelson - You're finding a vineyard that you like. And then what happens? So how do you contact the owner? How do you stipulate a contract? What the contract includes?
Duncan - So the thing is, is that in the early days, I definitely, all my negotiations definitely took their toll on my liver because you know, what we used to do, like a lot of the farmers, they, they like to, like a lot of the guys are grape farmers, you know, and they don't necessarily. They don't make their own wines. They don't do all those kind of things. But guys love brandy in South Africa. And guys also love to distill their own little, I don't know what you guys would call it, moonshine or whatever. We call it Witblits here in South Africa. And Witblits is like 60% alcohol, and it sort of burns everything inside you. And every time we tried to do deals with farmers, it was generally over a little couple of these little Witblits shots. And it was... But you know, it sounds like a stupid story, but at the end of the day, you know, everything, all our sales, wine sales is about relationships. The quality and bottle is super important and the quality obviously will always prevail, but relationships are such a key element. And it's exactly the same in the vineyards. If we're sourcing fruit, those relationships with growers are super important. So we already know. I mean, I've worked in South Africa, I understand the landscape here, you know, we travel a lot through different vineyards, we spend a lot of time visiting different sites and you get a real understanding of where you would like to. And look, you guys know how it works, right? What you think is going to work doesn't always work. You have to do it a few times, you have to get to, you have to not only develop a relationship with a farmer, but you need to develop a relationship with a site. So I might take grapes from one site one year, and it might be amazing. And then next year, we have a... you know, different weather sort of phenomenon, because these days we don't know what the hell's going on with the bloody weather, but a different weather phenomenon, and suddenly the wine's not so good. So with Salt River, because it's a multi-site wine, we've hedged our bets a bit. Every year we experiment with a new parcel. It's a wine in our range that we're not looking to enter into necessarily longer term relationships in the early days. That'll come with time. You know, as I say time is the big factor because like with the savage wines in the early days It was most of our grievance were just handshakes You know, we drank Witblits with the guys or a glass of wine or a few beers or whatever We shook hands and we did business together and ironically enough Some of my arrangements are still based on that original handshake But what we are trying to do because we putting so much money into replacing dead vines, you know composting mulching all of that kind of stuff In a lot of the new land we're leasing now, we're planting vignettes, there it's a little bit more complicated. You're a lot more exposed on just the handshake. Where with the Salt River parcels, it's obviously we're going in, the guys are doing a lot of the farming work, we're just guiding them in terms of what we want to do in the canopies and then we're picking the fruit.
Mike - And with these more sort of unique small kind of parcel wines that you're making, that would be... different, I suppose, to like a big producer who has to, you know, guarantee themselves a chunk of volume each year or for making wines at this more sort of entry level end, that would be, is that, that's a different kind of way of working or is it, is there some similarity there just as a comparison?
Duncan - Yeah, look, so with the Savage wines, you know, so never been asked to dance is our Chenin. The girl next door is a Syrah we make. That's 0.38 of a hectare. We've just planted, we're leasing two and a half hectares on a farm. I'm slightly biased, obviously, but I think this vineyard's gonna be epic. It's like, it's super steep south facing. That's two and a half hectares. So what I'm trying to get at is that all of those sites are, the site is the site. We're not supplementing those wines. So. You know, some of them may not be a single vineyard production because it might be two parcels on the same piece of land. But we don't, if we get half the crop, that's the wine. If we get more than, you know, a bigger crop, great. Where Salt River's a little different because Salt River, you know, we've got a lot of guys who list it in restaurants by the glass, that kind of thing. So there we're trying to have a little bit more continuity through the year. So we... We are looking to supplement where possible. And through that, we also, like I said earlier, experimenting with different sites all the time. So, you know, what might work, you hedge your bets. You know, like I say, mostly northerly slopes with higher solar radiation and that kind of thing. But if someone's got a parcel of something super interesting that's on a different slope, I'm gonna have a crack. And you must remember that what's also happening in South Africa is like a lot of the... The bigger guys, Distell, for example, was bought by Heineken. They had access to so much fruit in Stellenbosch. All of a sudden, you're in this position where they've sort of stopped. The focus is not so wine-driven anymore. It's a little bit more, it's completely different. A lot of these vineyards are freed up, and those are sort of bigger sites. So Salt River's also gave me an opportunity to go in and not just lease like one hectare or something. I can go in if the site's five hectares and we can... work the whole site essentially, which is a little bit... Because obviously it's got a little bit more volume to it than some of the savage wines.
Nelson - When you're buying the grapes, do you give farming suggestions to the farmers? Like, can you control yield or pruning decisions?
Duncan - Everything. So we are very particular when it comes to that. And that's why, like I say, with the savage vineyards, we kind of... We don't... We prune everything. We do all the... You know, we even pick our own grapes these days because the thing is that, you know, with picking fruit... you literally, everyone tries to sort in the winery, but by the time you get to the winery, you can still sort it. We don't have like, I'm not like some fancy seller, so we don't have these very shiny, fancy machines that do all the sorting and you just press a green button and then a red button and everything's perfect. We don't have that, everything's still done by hand. So we go into the vineyards and we pick every bunch, you cut out all those little berries. On Salt River, obviously you're handling Sauvignon, so white grapes, it's more difficult to do that. And we've been very lucky that In all the vintages we've made salt river to date, we haven't had to worry about things like rot. I've also liked to be quite high on a slope, so there's more wind. I love wind. So we're very particular in all of those elements, Nelson. But when it comes to salt river, what we do is we don't just, you know, a lot of farmers, it's generally trellis vineyards we're working with, and then guys like this sort of big canopy because when the canopy is big and green, it looks like you've farmed it well, and you patch yourself on the back, and everything looks good. That's not what we're looking for. We go in and we want vineyards with low vigor that can still crop at a level that makes it financially viable because obviously salt rivers coming in at a cheaper price point than some of our savage wines where we can do more in the vineyards. But it's also going to be sustainable for the farmer as well, you know. So it's super important that we get the right crop levels. But we go in and we break leaves. So most guys when they see our vineyards for Salt River, they shit themselves completely. I don't know if I can say that. Sorry. They get a little bit stressed out because we strip all the leaves completely. So the fruit hangs from both sides completely exposed. So a lot of people with Sauvignon over the years spend a lot of time trying to protect the fruit that you don't get sunburn and you don't lose all those thiols. We are trying to burn away those thiols. We don't want that. We want, you know, wine that's got a little bit of restraint to it that, you know, we can, with the tool, like using a bit of reduction in the winemaking process, we can... accentuate the salinity. I think that salinity is such an important factor because when I was at Cape Point, we had a natural salinity because we had this wind coming off the ocean. There was a physical salt deposit. I don't have that in these vineyards that I'm working with now. We rely a little bit on wine making technique and then ensuring that a wine is not too fruit driven because if it's too fruit driven, then obviously that's the overriding factor that people are exposed to. But to answer your question, we manipulate everything that's formed according to a style of wine. We don't try and fix anything in the winery. We try and keep it as simple as possible in the winery. We do all the work in the vineyard.
Nelson 0 So Duncan, in 2004, you worked with the late Didier Dagueneau, the co-producer of Pouilly Fume in the Lower Valley. We were curious about what did you learned from him and if he's something in Salt River that reflects that experience.
Duncan - Yeah, so Didier is a, I mean, you know, obviously him passing was super sad. You know, I went to him in 2004. And I mean, he was a legend. He made some incredible wines. I told you this the other day, Nelson, Didier's daughter, Charlotte, she actually lives in South Africa in Johannesburg and is a life partner of one of my very good friends, Derek Kilpin, who is one of the owners of Great Domaines, who sells lots of good burgundy and all of that in South Africa. So Charlotte works for the business. I mean, it was... Six months ago I was in Joburg and we were drinking 2005 Asteroid, which is what Didier used to make, you know, that little vignette on its own roots. And that wine was incredible. I mean, as youthful as you can imagine. And a lot of people like, like what I thought was quite cool is in South Africa Sauvignon was popular and has always been popular because it's like a refreshing drink. And you get a lot of people around the world that love to, especially guys who love fine wine, love to, you know, do a lot of Sauvignon bashing, you know. And I think that was quite cool because you went to a guy like Didier, who you look at a wine like Asteroid, who I mean that thing in 2004 I think was 400 euros a bottle. And it was a Sauvignon and it was epic. And I think that was the thing is that he showed me what was potential, what could be done with Sauvignon. So when I came back from Didier after that 04 year was we started, we were already doing quite a bit of stuff at Cape Point in Barrel, but we changed that, we shifted the whole mindset. In South Africa at the time, everyone was obsessed with this green flavored Sauvignon. I have no idea why, but it was the trend at the time. I think a lot of it had to do with if someone smelled a wine and it smelled like freshly mowed grass, they could identify the smell immediately and they knew they were drinking Sauvignon. Freshly mowed grass, it smells good when you mow the lawn, but I don't want to drink that smell. It just doesn't make sense. You're not expressing the terroir because you're picking underripe grapes. And I think that, so what we did when I came back is if you try, if you'd get the 2005 Cape Point wines, again, I'm slightly biased. The 2005 I think is one of the greatest white wines that's been made in South Africa again. But it was like, it was just such an epic wine. I can't even find a bottle of that stuff. I just drank it all. It was so good. But the... The thing was, in 2005, we came in, we stripped leaves completely, we exposed all this fruit in the wind because we were struggling with green flavors because as soon as the wind gets quite intense, your vines shut down. So they want to conserve moisture, the stomata close, and you end up in a situation where the fruit, you're not getting physiological ripening. So we use the combination of obviously the physiological processes within the vine and then just. light exposure, you know, but from an early time, you know, if you get, if you go down to the beach, you guys come from London and you rock up at the beach in Cape Town in your speedos and I know you like a speedo, Nelson.
Mike - He's Italian.
Nelson - Totally.
Duncan - You get into the sun, it's going to fry you like a crayfish in half an hour. So you've got to allow the grapes to get a tan. So we, we open those canopies after flowering at basically matchsticks. So you know, when the berries are tiny before the bunches close. and we get as much light into those little bunches as we can. And they basically, they become tough and hardy and they can take the sun. And you end up in picking these golden little bunches, which we still do today for obviously Savage White and now for Salt River as well. And we put a lot of those wines to barrel. And we try to then break away from that aromatic dimension of Sauvignon and bring in more textural dimension. And again, We didn't want to, it wasn't like this natural wine tangent where you don't know what variety you're tasting because it could be bloody anything. It was, we still wanted it to be, you know, have that typical, it's still Soviet. It smells like a Sauvignon or tastes like a Sauvignon, but not the confected, you know, sort of style. So that was the thinking at the time. And it was quite funny as those 2005s at Cape Point, we had such resistance in the market here in South Africa. The guys... didn't want to buy the wines because they were linear, they were all steer, there was not a hint of green in those wines. I mean, they were some of the most beautiful wines we'd made. And because I was working for someone at the time, you know, it wasn't my business. I had to play to the markets a little bit, you know. So if you taste the Cape points, you'll see 05 was, I mean, as good as Sauvignon from South Africa gets, I believe. And then 06 and 07 were slightly more herbal because we had to sort of wean people off the green. It sounds crazy, but you've got to run a business as well. And then come 2008, we went more floral. And then from 2009, we started with full power of extract, just getting as much of that greenness as we possibly could out of the grapes. And yeah, I think some of those cave points over the years were incredible. And you'll see if you taste the Savage White these days, it's that sort of dynamic. We want that sort of mineral. And again, using... reduction as a tool in the winery. So getting as much as you can and right in the vineyard, and then just doing the basics in the winery, and just leaving the wine basically on gross lease for as long as possible, just to get those elements of reduction. And then that's translating into salt river as well, where we're trying to just showcase that salinity, minerality. And the thing about wines like that is, if you've got this fruit cocktail, you have a glass, but you get tired of it. With Salt River, it's kind of like Moorish. You have a glass, you feel like another glass, you start eating, the wine opens up. We've specifically bottled the wines with slightly lower acidities. There's a bit more roundness to the wine. The 23 will still be angular because it's young, but you give them a urine bottle and they just soften and it's fantastic.
Nelson - Do you have any anecdotes from your time at Didier Dagueneau?
Duncan - Didier was a marketing genius. He left me. I'll never forget the one day. There was a bunch of politicians from Switzerland or something like that, government officials, let's say it like that, from Switzerland. Small bus, like 20 of these guys. So Didier said to me, just receive these guys. And I was like, I can't speak French. So he says, you'll be all right. So I went, he drives off. I'm standing here, this bus arrives. And I'm like... this random South African dude in Puillu standing next to the bus. These Oaks are like, what the hell's going on here?
Mike - Bonjour.
Duncan - -Yeah, bonjour. And that's where it stopped. Like, wee wee. Then done. And fortunately, the Oaks from Switzerland or wherever, I think it was Swiss guys, they can all speak English. And so we talked a bit of cock for a while. And then Didier comes in, and he was obviously referred to as the wild man of Pui. So he had to keep his. So he comes in and most people were driving with closed vans. But then if you come to South Africa, you'll see like the pickups we drive, the Buckies, he had one of those. And he came around the corner and did like a handbrake turn and this was a cloud of dust. And then sort of Didier just emerges from this Buc-E. I promise you those Oaks all were taking their credit cards out. They were like, how much wine can we buy basically? And you know, he was good like that. And look, Didier was by no means, I didn't go there and have a. like a holiday, he was a tough guy. I mean, he was driven, he knew what he wanted. And he also pissed off a lot of people in that neck of the woods because he was quite particular in what he wanted to achieve. But it's quite cool. I've gotten to know a lot of guys in the area. There's a guy, Antoine Gouffier. I don't know if you've crossed paths with Antoine. He used to live in South Africa for a while. Such a legend, become such a good mate of mine. And we've gotten to know a few of those guys. And it's quite a... quite a link because I think that depending on the style you make, I've always preferred that Loire style of Sauvignon relative to what the Kiwi style is. And you can't knock the Kiwi stuff, you know, the Kiwi stuff is incredible, the guys, what they've achieved, the aromatics, but it's very difficult for us to achieve that. I think that, you know, in terms of getting a little bit more restraint and minerality to the wine is... is super cool, you know, and we must embrace that because it's what our climate is good with.
Mike - I'd love to ask you as the third question about this kind of change of style that you have or the role of oxidation and reduction, because I think that it might be confusing to some people that a wine can be both oxidative and reductive at the same time. So that's the kind of question that I want to throw at you about how you walk that balance and how you find that style. where that comes from with the different vessels and blending and all the different options to create that.
Duncan - Yeah, so it's funny, I did a tasting for some guys the other day, and they were like super young wine guys. It was a bunch of waiters from a restaurant, and these guys were just frothing for wine knowledge. And I was telling, oxidative, reductive, they were so confused by the end of the tasting. They were like, I think those, I don't think I helped their selling ability in any way when it came to talking about the wines. So it is quite crazy, but the thing is, is that, you know, from an oxidative point of view, so when the fruit arrives at the cellar, we try our best to oxidize the juice. And I think that, you know, each producer has their own way of wanting to do things. You know, if you look at like, like in the old days in Burgundy, I mean, all those premox issues that they've had, I mean, white Burgundy, you know, everyone used to age white Burgundy. Now most people drink it when they get it, you know, it's like they're all still examples of age, but, you know, and the change of protecting the juice from oxygen, the movement away from those old Vaslin screw presses that squeeze the living crap out of the grapes, you know? So all these, you know, these very soft, gentle extractions, you know, guys using those inert presses where there's no oxygen contact and these juices are absolutely perfectly, you know, almost like green and fresh, they're so vibrant. We don't do that. We used to try and develop our own press programs and then I was like, this is such a, we over thought the stuff. So now I've gone back to the standard press programs. We load the grapes in, all whole bunch. We press the green button and we go and do other stuff. And the press runs till it's finished. We press hard and we've got this massive drip tray. So we let it fill up each time. And then only once it's full, we pump the juice out. And then we do pump overs on the juice generally just to try and aerate the juice, which is most people are trying to protect it. So from an oxidative point of view, we oxidize the juice. And then obviously once it starts fermenting, fermentation is a very reductive process because the yeast is scavenging all the available oxygen that's available within the juice. So you go from that very oxidative handling to a very reductive process. And once the wine is finished fermentation, there we no longer. we're no longer looking to oxidize. So when someone drinks a glass of Salt River, or hopefully a bottle or two, they're going to not find a wine that is oxidative in style. It's still going to have freshness. It's if anything going to be a little tighter and leaner. So the oxidative part of our process is in winemaking and on the juice. After that, we leave the wines without sulfur on lease for a long time, but it's in a reductive environment. So the wines are not going to become these sort of flabby elder headache sort of bombs, they're gonna retain that sort of purity and that salinity which will hold them together in bottle.
Mike - Where is it then with terms of the gross lees? So do you tend to keep wine on gross leesif possible?
Duncan - I mean, I guess sometimes it just becomes too stinky and it's hard to do, but is that your preferred method to just stay on gross lees for as long as possible? Yeah, look, I think like with the savage wines, we'll do gross lees in barrel. You know, we won't necessarily wreck those. A barrel is, I know now we're going to get more confusing again, but a barrel is naturally a more oxidative vessel. It has aeration so the wine will develop, as you guys know. As soon as you're in stainless and the vast majority of, say, 80% of salt rubies done in stainless, it's a pretty inert medium and there's no oxygen ingress unless you're racking or moving the wine. So we are careful with lees. And also you must remember, like in a barrel. If you've got it, we do a lot of work with 500 and 600 liters. That was another thing I learned with Didier. Didier was working with 600-liter barrels. That was quite cool. It was a very thick state of 600-liter. I have to say they're really nice barrels, but they suck to work with because they're so damn heavy. The thing is that with the tanks, you can imagine your pressure on the lease in a barrel is far less. Whereas if you've got a 10,000 liter tank, there's a lot more pressure on that lees. So your compaction of lees becomes more of a critical factor and obviously then, quite hectic reduced flavors. So what we don't do is while we on gross lees, we don't sell for the wine out. So we've got 60,000, all the production sitting there in tank, no sulfur on gross lees. And that's all only when we rectify these, where we do a sulfur addition on those wines, because we are very careful of that. So it's just a function of tasting regularly and just trying to understand the dynamic of the wine and how it's evolving on that leaves.
Mike - -Just to go back to one thing that caught my attention when you were talking about the vineyard, with exposing the fruit, with having warmer site viticulture. Where does the freshness come from? Because there's obviously no lack of freshness in this wine, but you're trying to balance this riper style in some sense with these kind of smoky elements, but it's also zingy, fresh, clearly a wine that will age well. So where does that come from in that balance?
Duncan - Look, so the thing in South Africa is obviously we have a lot of sun. Rippling grapes is generally not a problem unless there's leaf roll virus or something like that. So our challenge is generally always acidity, but one of the varieties that I think offers, you know, from that point of view, from an acidity point of view, one of the varieties that's fantastic is Sauvignon. Sauvignonhas a naturally high acidity. So if you look at like, like what we do with Savage White, for example, so it's based on the Bordeaux model. And if you look at a lot of what the Bordeaux are doing, there's a lot of wines that are, you know, maybe 50% semi or slightly more than that. I know ferlierfh used to favor with their ferlierfh white, a more semi-or-driven wine. I specifically do a little bit more soviel-driven because we get more acidity, we get more freshness. So the wines may seem slightly angular when they're young, but when you give them a bit of time or you pair them with food, because that's the reality of wine. I mean, when you sit down and taste it, it might seem the tannins might seem aggressive, the acidity might seem angular, whatever. As soon as you start eating, that wine changes completely. So with Sauvignon, we have a natural acidity that we work with. If you look at the analytically in those wines, we're looking at around about sort of between five, five and say 6.2 grams of tartaric, which is not high levels. You'll find a lot of those very commercial Sauvignon that are too deep, which will be a bit higher. And then what they do is they soften them with residual sugar. When you taste the Soltrov in the early days, it might have a feeling of. being slightly austere in terms of acidity because we bottle them as dry as we can get them. We don't want residual sugar because it's like putting makeup on it. It detracts from what actually the wine looks like in many ways. But a useful tool in other instances, if that makes sense.
Mike - Well, that was an absolutely brilliant run through, a mini masterclass in South Africa and the Sauvignon Blanc with Duncan Savage. So the three questions today were, we're walking through how to work with the vineyards and the contracts of selecting, buying, and farming grapes. We reflected on Duncan's experiences with the late Didier Dagenot and how that has influenced his winemaking style through his history at Cape Point. And part three was the question about balancing oxidation and reduction to make this kind of specific style. So... We hope you like it, we hope you listened along and enjoyed a bottle of Salt River and if you didn't, I hope you've attempted to go out and buy one. And big thanks again to Duncan for his time.
Duncan - Thanks guys, thanks for having me.
