Thorne & Daughters Paper Kite Old Vine Semillon 2022

Thorne and Daughters Wines was started in 2012 by John and Tasha Seccombe to produce authentic wines in the beautiful Western Cape. They chose ‘Thorne’ to label the winery because it is John’s middle name, linked to the family for some four centuries. The theme of childhood play for the names of the wines is 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’.
Paper Kite is their expression of old vine South African Semillon, and it is sourced from a fifty-eight year-old vineyard in the Swartland. These old clones of Semillon (including a tiny amount of Semillon gris dotted about the vineyards) deliver an expression of Semillon that is very much at odds with the modern, aromatic clones. The wines they produce are hauntingly beautiful and difficult to define.