$44.00
Two weeks of skin contact. Attractive aromatics of potpourri plus hints of ginger and other spice as well as naartjie and stone fruit while the palate is juicy and fresh, the finish surprisingly soft as skin-contact wines go – flavour and accessible.
Out of stock
Hawkins has played left field from the start. His winemaker brother, Neil Hawkins (now making wine in Australia), gave him cellar-rat jobs for pocket money while he was still at school. He asked Eben Sadie for a job as a cellar hand after university and then spent the next six years dividing his year between South Africa on the Sadie Family estate, and working stages around Europe for Stéphane Ogier, Dirk Niepoort, Dorli Muhr, Rémy Pedreno of Roc d’Anglade and Tom Lubbe.
It was Lubbe, at Matassa, who was to have one of the greatest influences on his values and winemaking style. When he settled down in 2008 it was to start his Testalonga project with skin-contact Chenin Blanc El Bandito, and soon thereafter to work at Lammershoek for then-owners, Austrian Paul and Anna Kretzel. They later became his parents-in-law when he married their daughter Carla.
Lammershoek underwent a rocky change of ownership in 2014. Craig and Carla left and decided to turn Testalonga from a garage-wine project into a fully fledged wine estate.
