2023 Paulus Bartas Stellenbosch Chenin

Full bottle 1,393 g. Bartas is French (Occitan) slang for something along the lines of `struggling to find a path through the wilderness to find your way to the cliff/the edge’. It represents Paul Jordaan and Pauline Roux’s wine journey. The fruit comes from a dry-farmed Chenin vineyard planted in 1978 from which you can see the sea. Hand-picked, whole-bunch pressed into old oak barrels and then undergoes spontaneous fermentation. It matures in 500-litre barrels for 12 months, before being racked and bottled, without fining or filtering, and with just a small dosage of SO2. Honey and honeysuckle fill the glass before its halfway to my lips. And then it arrives and the wine is a collage of haptic flavours; a pepper-stippled swirl of creaminess; the sting and swash of grapefruit and citron; the fissure of apricot stone and the suck of apricot flesh. Crunch and crackle of acidity and something green that seems to snap the finish in half leaving you reaching for the next sip. 17.5 points