Thorne & Daughters “Cats Cradle” Chenin Blanc 2021

John Seccombe and co-owner and wife Tasha founded Thorne & Daughters winery just over ten years ago. They chose ‘Thorne’ to label the winery because it is John’s middle name, linked to the family for some four centuries, and the theme of childhood play for the names of the wines, suggestive of the sense of purity in their flavours and the lack of artifice in their making. This happens in the Gabriëlskloof cellar in the Overberg, using grapes from sites across the winelands and a ‘simple, honest and gentle’ approach, the goal being ‘putting together old vineyard parcels with new grape varieties, and making wines with old-school simplicity and a modern edge, that tell a story of the Cape of Good Hope’.

Langkloof, where John sources the grapes for this wine is an old bush vine Chenin Blanc vineyard planted on the granite slopes of the Paardeberg. The wine is aged for nine months in neutral 228L French oak barrels.