Food & Wine

This week we began harvesting and making wine. The grapes are good quality this year but the baboons, growing in number on the mountain, have taken tons off the crop. Here the team is picking viognier which is then taken to the winery to be destemmed and crushed, before being pressed. After settling overnight the…

Dragonridge is increasingly being recognized for its spectacular bubblies and this year we are celebrating this with a bubbly tasting and canape lunch. Sunday 24 February 2019 at 12h30 It will include a tasting of 3 Pét-Nats (Supernova) and 2 MCC’s (Orion’s Belt) and with 4 Platter Guide stars for our first bubbly submitted, you…

We are sometimes asked what our logo symbolizes and where it came from. The answer is both simple and complicated, as all things with Johan Simons, our dear winemaker! Johan first fell in love with the concept of the Japanese Ensō circle and recognized the similarities between that and the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros.…

Once again Dragonridge participated in the Swartland Heritage Festival held at Parternoster at the Old Fish Market. It was very well attended, excellent wine abounded and fun was had by all.

It’s Limoncello time again and as always it is exciting to come to the end of a long process – especially when the end means something delicious to drink. Limoncello takes ages to make. Lemons picked from various spots on the farm are zested and steeped in spirits for 40 days. The extract is then…

Soon after we arrived these plonking city types had to get it together to harvest and take in close to 300 tonnes of grapes. This was the amount contracted to Swartland Co-op (bought with the farm as our quota) It was a lot of grapes to deal with and daunting. We found out about a…

This is a question often asked of us. Isn’t all wine natural because it comes from grapes?  The answer is no, it isn’t! Making natural wine starts in the vineyard.   The vines, for example ours, are farmed organically – which means no herbicides or pesticides are used. We do in fact weed our vines by…

These three special Dragonridge wines are now available and drinking beautifully. As with all our wines, they are made naturally from our own non irrigated and organically farmed bush vines which produce small quantities of intensely flavoured berries.  These, with great love and care, translate into delicious wines.  Our wines have very low sulphites (one…

Wine has been around since at least the Paleolithic time period. Evidence from that era shows that it was used not only for enjoyment but also medicinal and health purposes. In that time, wine was made in small batches and from natural, plant-based ingredients only. As you can expect, the winemaking process of today is…