In less than 15 years, since debuting with the 2010 vintage, Porseleinberg, from the Swartland in South Africa, has put itself firmly on the map of the world’s greatest syrahs. With its mighty tannic structure and inherent savouriness, incredible perfume and long ageing potential, comparisons with the northern Rhône are inevitable – most often with Cornas or Côte-Rôtie – but ultimately this is a distinctly and proudly Swartland syrah, that to me evokes its own very specific place. I am thrilled to be offering the latest, just-released and hotly sought-after 2023 vintage to members.
Order by midday on Thursday 25th September
Porseleinberg is named after the remote, seriously schisty hilltop on which the vineyard sits, south of Riebeek-Kasteel. Callie Louw has lived, farmed the vines and made the wine here since 2009, appointed by the visionary behind Boekenhoutskloof, Marc Kent. (2025 was in fact Callie’s last vintage and he has just this month moved on to a new project of his own.) Well off the beaten track – though I can confirm a little rental car can just about make the bumpy ride to the top – the site feels remote and raw, even in the context of the rough-around-the-edges Swartland. To borrow Callie’s words, it is ‘hardcore’: 80% rock with very little topsoil.
The syrah it yields is a wine whose journey I have followed closely since the beginning of my buying career; I’ve become mildly obsessed and endlessly fascinated by this captivating wine. So much so that last year I organised a vertical tasting of the first 12 vintages for a motley crew of friends; the wines blew us all away and we have vowed to repeat the event in another few years.
This is the first time we have offered Porseleinberg as a First Release, and I would really recommend you keep it safely, beyond temptation, in your Reserves for a few years to come, as while it’s delicious now, it is just going to get better and better. At the recent ten-years-on blind tasting of South Africa’s ‘New Wave’ wines, Porseleinberg 2015 was the top wine of the day, taken on the average scores of the tasting group (which included Jancis Robinson MW, Neal Martin and Tim Atkin MW, as well as The Society’s Matthew Horsley and I); it still, at a decade old, felt young.
The vintage conditions
The 2023 vintage reminds Callie of 2017, in that both were cooler growing seasons with some later rains that replenished the vines. While 2017 was the second year of the infamous three-year drought, they actually had even less rainfall in 2023, at just 308mm, so it was not an easy year to be managing the vines on the shallow, rocky soils of Porseleinberg. The lack of rainfall combined with poor berry set resulted in a small yield.
The winemaking approach
Porseleinberg’s winemaking has always been about minimal intervention in the cellar and traditional practices for syrah, with whole-bunch wild fermentation in concrete tanks, and maturation in a mix of foudre and concrete eggs (the 2023 vintage is 90% foudre, 10% concrete).
With the 2018 vintage, Callie moved from two pumpovers a day to submerging the cap (keeping the grape skins below the surface of the fermenting liquid), inspired by a trip to Jamet in Côte-Rôtie. In 2023, however, he took 30% of the wine through a ‘conventional ferment’ with pumpovers, allowing for a more oxidative extraction, and you can feel this in the densely structured finish.
