Written by Davy Strange
View the original review here.
This wine is an oenological TARDIS. It has massive features in its core, but they are wrapped up into a very svelte, elegantly-poised wine. That must mean that Ian Naudé is The Doctor and so I must grill him about next week’s lottery numbers!
The core of this Old Vine Chenin Blanc is a confidently structured edifice with prodigious density and power. There is old vine depth of fruit, and layers of greengage, grassy, apple-y fruit that just keep displaying more involute, stylish sophistication as you plunge further into its seemingly unfathomable scale.
Ian Naudé has allowed this Old Vine Chenin Blanc to speak of its origins so clearly that if you were transported to the vineyard you would be able to identify it as the home of this wine by comparing its smell, texture and taste with those features of the vineyard soil. It is the Platonic ideal of old vine Chenin Blanc fruit from a special, unique location.
However, this strident communication of origin, this plummeting depth of flavour and complexity are all wrapped up in a bundle of small-scale beauty. The Old Vine Chenin Blanc is a delicate 12.5% and has light, energetic, vivacious acidity that keeps it pirouetting across your palate with supreme élan and panache. It is tear jerkingly winsome.
So, a wine of dichotomies! Scale, density and power that sing of its home vineyard all precisely packaged within a coy, but but deliciously energetic, sculpted vision of beauty. Utterly beguiling; it leaves me smitten with naught to remember it by but an empty bottle and an explendency of cogitation.
