What's Behind the Landscape Series Label?

Every bottle in our Landscape Series carries a label painted with rock ground from our own vineyards. (That's not a metaphor. It's actual soil, quite literally the ground beneath the vines, mixed with natural binders and painted onto the label by hand.) To explain why, we have to go back to where the range started.

Bernhard spent years looking for a piece of land that would root him to the spot. He found it in 2001, a canola farm called Avontuur, and renamed it Gabriëlskloof. When Peter-Allan joined us as cellar master in 2014, he brought a way of letting that land speak for itself in the glass, rather than shaping it into something more familiar. The Landscape Series grew out of that.

It's a range of six wines built on our finest vineyard sites, together with a handful of old vine parcels we've sourced further afield. The idea from the start was an honest representation of the elements that make each site unique. Whole bunch pressing, wild fermentation, minimal intervention. We let the site do the talking and try to stay out of the way while it does.

Sandstone and Shale

It's easy to reach for "terroir" as a word that explains everything and nothing. We'd rather be a bit more precise about it, and that starts underground.

We farm on two very different kinds of rock. Table Mountain sandstone is hard, quartz-rich, and breaks down into coarse, free-draining soil that holds almost nothing back for a thirsty vine. Bokkeveld shale is the opposite: fine-grained, clay-rich, good at holding onto water and nutrients through a long, dry Bot River summer. Same rain, same sun, very different living conditions below ground.

A vine on sandstone runs short of water earlier in the season. Under that mild stress it tends to produce smaller berries with more skin relative to juice, and since colour, tannin and a good deal of aroma live in the skin, the result is naturally more concentrated. Yields drop, but what's left is dense and precise. A vine on shale rarely runs dry. It keeps ripening steadily right through the hottest weeks without shutting down, which gives fuller berries, riper tannins, a rounder style.

That's the honest answer to why Syrah on Sandstone and Syrah on Shale, grown a short distance apart on the same farm, taste like two different wines. We'd stop short of saying the wine tastes like the rock itself. What the rock actually controls is water and nutrients, and it's that indirect route, through vine stress and ripening speed, that shapes what ends up in the glass. Soil shapes vine, vine shapes wine.

Elodie tells a related but different soil story. The 2025 draws on four dryland Swartland bushvine sites: granite-derived Jakkalsfontein (planted 1986), iron-rich Nuweland (planted 1981), and now Rooidraai (planted 1981) and Serdyn (planted 1989) too. Granite sits somewhere between the two Syrah extremes, decent drainage without starving the vine entirely, and old bushvines across all four sites bring their own concentration simply through age and low yield.

Magdalena and Era René take a different approach. Rather than drawing their character from one soil, we build them by assembling fruit from several sites and letting the blend itself tell the story, which is part of why Magdalena has never sat still.

From Vineyard to Label

Every ten years, we ask a new artist to reinterpret the series. Overberg artist Niël Jonker held that role first, his paintings on our labels for a decade. Rod Freemantle has since taken over, and his approach is a different one entirely: he grinds rock taken from our own home farm, mixes it into pigment, and paints each label with it. It isn't rock from wherever a particular wine's grapes happen to grow, it's rock from the estate itself, the one constant across a series that otherwise draws fruit from sites well beyond our boundaries. In another ten years, someone else will be asked to find their own way of saying the same thing, and the series will look different again without losing the idea underneath it.

Elodie, Magdalena, Era René

Three of the six wines carry family names, and the thread runs back to Bernhard.

Elodie and Magdalena are both named after his sisters. Era René is named after his mother, honouring her legacy of grit and unconditional love. Alongside the geology and the artwork, it's a quieter way of keeping the people who built this place present in the range that represents it best.

A series that isn't set in stone

For a range so grounded in specific soils, we've never treated the Landscape Series as a fixed formula.

Magdalena is the clearest example. From 2017 to 2021 it was a Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc blend, with Semillon's share climbing steadily from 58% to 90% across those vintages, built on forty year old Franschhoek vines and our own Bot River fruit. By 2022 and 2023 it had become a pure expression of old vine Semillon, drawn from three separate vineyards. Then in 2024 we changed it again: a four variety blend led by Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc, with Semillon now the third voice rather than the first, and a small addition of Muscat d'Alexandrie for scent. Lined up side by side, that arc is visible in the glass, from the blackcurrant and orange blossom of the 2017 through to the pear and thai basil of 2024.

Elodie is quietly doing the same thing from a different direction. It started on two vineyard sites and has grown to four, Rooidraai and Serdyn joining Jakkalsfontein and Nuweland as we've found new old vine parcels worth bringing in. Nothing about the wine's identity was fixed at the outset. As new sites turn up that fit what we're trying to say, we add them.

Neither wine changed because something went wrong. They changed because we never set out to lock the range into a formula. We built it to follow the fruit, the season, and whatever old vineyards happen to surface.

Recognition along the way

None of this was built for the awards, but the recognition has followed closely enough that it's worth telling.

The Cabernet Franc's role in putting Cape Cabernet Franc on the map isn't just how we see it. Tim Atkin named it Red Wine Discovery of the Year not long after that first 2015 vintage, and it's kept climbing since, up to a first five-star, 95-point rating in Platter's 2026 guide. Peter-Allan was named Tim Atkin's Winemaker of the Year in 2021, the same year the Landscape Series wines settled into the 93 to 95 point range they've held fairly consistently ever since. Elodie has now taken five stars in Platter's for two consecutive editions, and across the 2026 guide nine of our wines sit at 4.5 stars or above.

We don't read that as proof the recipe is finished. We read it as confirmation that letting the site do the talking, even when that means a Syrah with less oak than expected or a Magdalena that changes its own mind every few years, has been the right instinct to keep following.

Six wines, one idea

Put together, the six wines are less a fixed collection than six different answers to the same question: what happens when you get out of the way and let a specific piece of ground speak for itself.

• Elodie, Chenin Blanc from four old Swartland bushvine sites, granite and iron-rich soils.
• Magdalena, the white blend that has reinvented its own recipe three times over.
• Era René, our first Bot River Chenin, named for Bernhard's mother, part fermented in clay amphorae.
• Syrah on Sandstone, low-yielding, water-stressed, concentrated.
• Syrah on Shale, steadily ripened, fuller, rounder.
• Cabernet Franc, first made in 2015 on the same restrictive sandstone that shapes our Syrah, one of the wines that helped put Cape Cabernet Franc on the map.

Different vineyards, different soils, different family names, even a different artist every decade. What holds the six together isn't a single flavour, it's the same decision, made again and again since 2014: find the site, understand what it's actually doing to the vine, and step back and let it show.