Angus Paul On a Flight of Furious Fancies Chenin Blanc 2024
Learn More About This Wine
One sight: the Polkadraai Hills; one grape: Chenin Blanc. This bottling currently uses one vineyard, on Karibib farm on False Bay. The bony granite soils, inexplicably but undeniably, in concert with the harsh winds of the South Easter, provide a racy expression of Chenin Blanc grown in a warm climate. Angus likes to think of this as what ought to be quintessentially a South African wine as can be: old vine Chenin, grown without irrigation on the coastal hillsides of Stellenbosch.
Grapes are hand-picked and cooled overnight. The following morning, they are put into the press and pressed as whole bunches. No sulphur, yeast, acid, enzymes or water were added. Very cloudy juice was transferred to neutral oak barrels, with only the heaviest of solids left behind. Fermentation took place over 4 weeks, after which about half of the barrels were sulphured for the first time. Wines were bottled in December after having spent 11 months in barrels with no racking or fining.
This vintage is open in body and tight in texture: kelp, citrus creams and apples jump forth. The palate is equally tight, but rounder than previous vintages. The acidity is ripe and rushes across the palate with waves of white stone fruit and golden delicious apples.
The name is inspired by an anonymous Medieval English poem, “Tom O’Bedlam”. This can be read many ways – it is quite literally a tale of Angus going off in flight and producing, zealously, this wine project. Or of the historic South African wine industry as a whale, producing wine in the corner of this mysterious continent. Or more recently, of the pioneering winemakers of the last 25 years, revitalising the industry. Or, in a profound sense, this Bacchic compulsion as humans, that wherever we go, we must make wine.
Tim Atkin’s MW – South Africa Report 2025 – 94 points
On A Flight of Furious Fancies comes from a 1988 parcel on the Karibib farm, planted on white silica, and is a chiselled expression of the variety that needed its full malolactic fermentation. Wild, savoury and nicely unkempt, it has layers of wax, lime and green apple and lots of focus and mid-palate concentration.
