Mullineux Old Vine White 2024

The Fever for the Cape

Some obsessions arrive like a song you didn’t know you already knew. That’s how it happened with South Africa for me — a place I’d tasted before I’d really seen it. There’s a quality in its wines that feels both weathered and alive, like wind over ironstone or salt settling on the skin after a swim. Once you feel it, you start to crave it — not the flavor exactly, but the sense of awakening that comes with it.

About ten years ago, a quiet revolution began at the southern tip of Africa. A handful of young winemakers looked around and realized that the land beneath their feet — their grandparents’ vines, their own forgotten hills — was extraordinary. These weren’t new plantings or international imports, but ancient survivors: vines a century old, twisted and scarred from sun and wind, their fruit shaped by decades of drought and dust. Grapes nearly vanished elsewhere — Red Semillon, Tinta Barocca, Clairette Blanche — were still rooted here, speaking an older dialect of wine.

What these winemakers found wasn’t just good fruit; it was an inheritance of resilience. They began to work with it, gently, reverently, crafting wines that tasted like nowhere else. Chris and Andrea Mullineux founded their estate in 2007, yet their roots run deeper than any date might suggest — in geology, in old vines, in a region defined by granite, schist and wind-baked earth.

Now in 2025, we’re drinking the 2024 vintage of their Old Vines White. It is built around approximately 68% Chenin Blanc, 14% Clairette Blanche, 6% Sémillon Gris, 6% Grenache Blanc and 6% Viognier. The vineyards from which these grapes come are genuinely old — up to 72 years of age, rooted in the granite soils of the Paardeberg mountain and the dry-land bush vines of Swartland.

In the glass, the 2024 Old Vines White appears as pale straw with a faint gold glow. On the nose: zest of fresh grapefruit, a whisper of powdered ginger, white-fleshed stone fruit, and under it all a salt-kissed breath of the Atlantic breeze. On the palate, it moves between grace and generosity: pear and nectarine, a touch of almond skin, the tension of saline minerality riding alongside a vibrant acidity that lifts the finish. The hand of the winemakers shows in the restraint—they have let the place speak. According to their own notes, the grapes were whole-bunch pressed, fermented with indigenous yeasts for up to ten weeks and aged eleven months in third- to fifth-fill French oak 500 L barrels plus new 2000 L foudres.

What I love about this wine is its invitation. You can drink it now — its vitality still luminous — but you could also wait. In three years it may begin to shed its youth and reveal more depth, more texture, more of that soil-light energy. The vineyard lies in a land that has known scarcity and plenty, drought and relief, and the wine captures that rhythm.

You may finish a bottle and remember taste alone. But I hope you’ll also remember dust, wind, the weight of vine-trunks twisting in sun, rock beneath root. A wine like this does more than quench; it connects. And in the glass you hold the Swartland’s quiet power, its voice regained.