Painted Wolf Solo Roussanne 2023

Bursting with stone fruit aromas, this is a wonderfully complex wine with a slight waxiness combined with vanilla and fresh minerality on the palate.

The grapes were hand-harvested riper than usual, whole-bunch pressed and fermented slowly with natural yeast. The wine spent 8 months in a 500-litre barrel, with daily stirring of the lees.

This wine is named for Solo of the Serengeti, the Painted Wolf (African wild dog) pup who inspired Hugo van Lawick and Jane Goodall’s ground-breaking 1978 film and book about the species. The name Solo was also given to a lone wild dog at Mombo in the Okavango about whom a fascinating documentary was made.

Roussanne, native to the warmer regions of France’s Rhône valley, is a relative newcomer and still very rare in South Africa.

Painted Wolf Wines supports the conservation of the highly endangered painted wolf (African Wild dog) and the protection of the diminishing wild spaces of Africa, through its donations to the EWT – www.ewt.org.za and Tusk https://tusk.org/