2019 Girl Next Door

From his cellar in Cape Town, Duncan Savage continues to produce an exceptional range that follows his ethos of site-specific wines made with a hands-off approach. Savage does not own any of the source vineyards, but two-thirds are farmed by Savage and his team; otherwise they are deeply involved with the viticulture. “One of the vineyards we work with, we have undertaken an extensive mulching program to increase the carbon in the soil,” he explained. “After the droughts, the vines were losing half the canopy. Within one season we saw the results. It has had a big impact on the wines. I would love to purchase land – there can’t be anything better than being on your own tractor farming on your own land. But the way that the business has grown, we rely on so many different sites over the Western Cape, had we stumbled on the chance to buy a piece of land, it would have been very small. We picked a path and we need to stick to it. That said, I am looking at land around the washed-out granites in the front end of Stellenbosch in the Polkadraai area.” With their quirky minimalist labels that refuse to give too much away (almost the opposite of Richard Kershaw), there is something enigmatic about Savage’s cuvées. Tasting through his 2019s, I did open a couple of back-up bottles where I felt there was something not quite correct; those second bottles did show better and, I suspect, were more representative. I particularly liked the evocatively titled “Thief In The Night” (a Grenache-based Rhône blend) and “Girl Next Door” (Syrah with 50% whole bunch), and the novel “Are We There Yet” (an equal blend of Touriga Nacional and Syrah that makes you wonder why these varieties are not frequently married).