I spent 4 days driving from Avignon all along the Rhône river through Hermitage, Crozes Hermitage, Condrieu to Côte Rôtie. It was fascinating and invigorating. Condrieu’s wines (or rather the ones I tasted), were mineral, fresh and lean with depth in character and complexity – and made from Viognier – a varietal we struggle with in South Africa.

The Story

TBC is a straight, single-vineyard Viognier. It is non-vintage which means that all the wine in the bottle is not from the same vintage. We picked the vineyard in two sections in 2021 – the first picking on a relatively low sugar and a second picking as a riper component. A combination of the two pickings make up 50% of the blend and were aged for 2 years in older French Oak barrels. The other 50% of the wine was an early picking of the same vineyard the following year (2022) which spent one year in barrel.

Sometimes, very inconveniently, the name and label of a wine just doesn’t happen when it’s supposed to. With the first vintage of this wine in 2018 that was exactly the case and subsequently, for quite some time, I just referred to it as TBC on my price list – Name to be confirmed.  One of my distributors, fed-up of waiting for the name to be confirmed, eventually said; “Why don’t you just call it TBC?!”

So TBC it was, but a label? At the time it was my youngest son’s 7th birthday party and he wanted me to build him a leopard cake – in 3D of course… To shape a leopard body is doable (I’ve had some practice… 3 kids 6,10 and 13 at the time made it 29 practice rounds in total), but a head of a leopard is beyond my scope of expertise. So, I took his teddy bear and applied paper mache to his head. After it dried I removed the bear shaped head and painted it as the head of a leopard. I fitted it to the leopard shaped cake body and my 7 year old was happy.

When I was under pressure to produce a label for TBC, this leopard head happened to be lying on my desk. No time left for inspiration to strike, I painted a background on a piece of paper, threw the paper mache head on it, took a picture with my iPhone and whalla!

Technical Information

Cultivar: Viognier (100%)

Vintage: 2022

Region: Stellenbosch

Amount of Bottles Produced: 1255

Alcoholic Strenght: 13.5%/vol

Acidity: 5.23g/l

PH: 3.64

Reducing Sugar: 2.5

Free SO2: 25ppm

Total SO2: 74ppm

Volatile Acidity: 0.62g/l

Closure: Natural Cork

Vegan: Yes