Vine Path Blog 9/20: Botanica/Big Flower Wines
Botanica/Big Flower Wines Vine Path Blog: 9/20
We were introduced to Ginny Povall, owner/winemaker at Botanica and Big Flower Wines, two years ago when she visited our store with our friend and enthusiastic South African wine advocate Pascal Schildt. We were immediately smitten with the wines, the project, and Ginny herself. We’ve long believed in the potential of South African wine. With some of the world’s oldest viticultural soils, a glut of super old, dry-farmed vineyards (many over 100 years old), and an extreme diversity of undervalued varieties, South Africa is in many ways a wine farmer’s dream. To us, it’s the new generation of winemakers in South Africa that are taking the best advantage of these features, making amazing wines of place that not only taste delicious but taste unique, challenging, and complex. The wines of Ginny Povall are indeed all of these things.
Ginny is impressive on many levels but perhaps the most impressive thing one could know about Ginny is that she is a completely self-taught winemaker. For years she would purchase grapes and vinify them in her own home, slowly refining her skills as a winemaker and developing an approach to making minimal intervention wines with precision and varietal typicity. Unlike pretty much every other home winemaker on earth, Ginny was able to turn her hobby into a career with the purchase of Protea Heights Farm, South Africa’s oldest flower farm. In 2009 Ginny started planting her estate vineyard, principally with Bordeaux varieties, which means these vines are still young. Normally oenophiles would scoff at young vine wines like this but once you taste these wines it becomes clear that there is extraordinary potential in these bottles.
Ginny has been working to fully convert Protea Heights Farm to regenerative agriculture, a new movement in organic farming that prioritizes the farms relationship to the ecosystem around it in the hopes to make the farm itself part of the greater habitat of the region. On top to being better for the local ecosystem, producing large, high-quality yields, and reducing disease and pest pressure, this farming practice also helps sequester CO2 in the soil through the practice of no-till farming. It’s our belief that grapes grown this way simply taste better. They’re more interesting, they express their varietal typicity more vividly, and they show their sense of place with boisterous pride.
Botanica Flower Girl Albarino
Botanica Flower Girl Albarino
For the Flower Girl line of wines, Ginny is striving to produce wines from her estate vineyard with an experimental edge. The experiment here is the grape Albarino, one of the only three Albarinos grown in South Africa. Stellenbosch’s warm climate really ripens this grape up so the result is a lush and full, bright and ripe, super aromatic and juicy expression of the grape. Packed with grapefruit, lemongrass, lime, and tropical fruit, this is a great wine to send off summer to.
Botanica Mary Delany Collection Pinot Noir
Botanica The Mary Delany Collection Pinot Noir
The Mary Delany Collection is Ginny's negociant line, made from grapes sourced from outside of her estate from vineyards that are also practicing regenerative agriculture. The line is dedicated to the 17th century artist Mary Delany who was responsible for the complex paper collages of flowers on all the Mary Delany Collection labels. Pinot Noir is staggeringly difficult to grow in South Africa since it really hates warm climates. It’s a finicky grape that is not very forgiving. For this bottle Ginny sources grapes from Hemel-en-Aarde, a rare cool microclimate in the Western Cape famous for Pinot Noir, and blends it with some Stellenbosch fruit. The result is one of the most vibrant, fresh, and well preserved South African Pinots we can think of. We’ve had this wine in the collection numerous times in the past. That should tell you something about how much we love it.
Big Flower Cabernet Sauvignon
Big Flower Cabernet Sauvignon
If Stellenbosch is famous for any grapes is the Bordeaux varietals. It’s warm and dry climate, it’s clay rich granite soils, it’s just a perfect place to grow Cabernet. Ginny’s Cabernet is made in a kind of old-school fashion in that she chooses to use larger and older oak barrels for the aging of the wine. While most Cabernet producers are chasing that heavily oaked style, Ginny wants to preserve the freshness of the fruit character. Massive, dense, chewy, ripe and fruity, notes of mocha and vanilla, with super opulent and soft tannins, this is an ideal form for South African Cabernet.
Big Flower Cabernet Franc
Big Flower Cabernet Franc
Cabernet Franc is the wine geeks favorite Cabernet. This has always been our favorite wine from the Big Flower collection. This Franc is less Loire and more Pomerol with it’s powerful tannins, dense color, and ripe flavor profile, and notably South African in it’s earthy, chewiness. Cabernet Franc’s characteristic savory, peppery tones come through abundantly on the nose, while it’s characteristic high acid shows through in the finish. If you’re a Cabernet Sauvignon fan, you’re going to love this one.
A panorama of Stellenbosch vineyards