Mullineux Family Wines Straw Wine (375ML half-bottle) 2021
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Robert
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James
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Ripe, fresh and brilliant in the glass, the 2021 Straw Wine offers purity of stonefruit with picturesque peach aromas and apricot purée before succulent honeysuckle florals seduce the nose. Medium to full-bodied and with only 8% alcohol, the wine somersaults across the palate with a brilliant sweetness, focus, precision and finesse, unwinding and uncoiling as it hangs in the mouth. It concludes with impeccable balance over the incredibly complex, long-winding finish. Its beauty is sure to delight for decades to come.
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James Suckling
Complex aromas of honied green apple, saffron and candied ginger. Full-bodied with bright, driving acidity and dense vibrant fruit. Layered and intense with wonderful length and seamless texture. Already delicious but will continue to get better with age. Drink or hold.
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Wine Spectator
This expressive sweetie draws you into the glass with an enticing nose of ripe fruit and floral notes, featuring glazed apricot, pineapple and tangerine fruit set on a silky, melt-in-your-mouth texture. Revealing accents of candied ginger, dried mint, crystallized honey, fleur de sel and smoke, this long, mouthwatering white expands on the lingering, spiced finish. Drink now through 2031.
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Wine & Spirits
The Mullineuxs harvest this fruit at the same time as their other chenins, then dry the grapes for a few weeks, yielding tropical fruit to spare, from orange marmalade to pineapple and papaya. Though it’s decadent and rich, a through line of acidity helps to energize the wine and it lasts on that gentle citrus savor. For a fussy citrus supreme dessert that requires too many hours of knifework.
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We are a small, highly focused Family winery based in the village of Riebeek Kasteel producing a select Family of hand-crafted wines from the granite and shale based terroirs of the Swartland Region of South Africa.
The Swartland is a beautiful and wild place. The landscape is a series of rolling hills, with a few significant outcrops of rock that form the Paardeberg, Riebeek Kasteel and Piketberg Mountains. It is not an easy place to establish vines, and is a region that has as much of an influence on the vineyards and people who farm there as the people have on the land itself. This brings to mind what film director David von Ancken has to say about the old American West: "The primal, universal power of the landscape strips away everything but the truth of men's souls." In much the same way, we feel the Swartland landscape bares the souls of grape vines, and in those varieties that can take the ruggedness, true personality of site is revealed.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
With an important wine renaissance in full swing, impressive red and white bargains abound in South Africa. The country has a particularly long and rich history with winemaking, especially considering its status as part of the “New World.” In the mid-17th century, the lusciously sweet dessert wines of Constantia were highly prized by the European aristocracy. Since then, the South African wine industry has experienced some setbacks due to the phylloxera infestation of the late 1800s and political difficulties throughout the following century.
Today, however, South Africa is increasingly responsible for high-demand, high-quality wines—a blessing to put the country back on the international wine map. Wine production is mainly situated around Cape Town, where the climate is generally warm to hot. But the Benguela Current from Antarctica provides brisk ocean breezes necessary for steady ripening of grapes. Similarly, cooler, high-elevation vineyard sites throughout South Africa offer similar, favorable growing conditions.
South Africa’s wine zones are divided into region, then smaller districts and finally wards, but the country’s wine styles are differentiated more by grape variety than by region. Pinotage, a cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsault, is the country’s “signature” grape, responsible for red-fruit-driven, spicy, earthy reds. When Pinotage is blended with other red varieties, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah or Pinot Noir (all commonly vinified alone as well), it is often labeled as a “Cape Blend.” Chenin Blanc (locally known as “Steen”) dominates white wine production, with Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc following close behind.