What I Drank Last Night

It’s not often that Merlot is the stand-out wine in a South African producers range but that’s certainly the case when it comes to the latest releases from Dombeya, the second label from Stellenbosch producer Haskell Vineyards. The wine spent 16 months in barrel, 30% new. An alcohol by volume of 14.9% and a residual [...]

In a nifty piece of product placement, Stellenbosch winery Haskell Vineyards announced today that its wines have been chosen to be served at the wedding of Prince Albert II of Monaco and Charlene Wittstock, a former South African Olympic representative. The wedding ceremony will take place in July this year. According to the media release, [...]

Haskell Vineyards is the Helderberg property acquired by international property and mining magnate Preston Haskell in 2002. Rianie Strydom, previously of Morgenhof, acted as consultant winemaker from January 2005 but was soon employed fulltime and has enjoyed what can only be described as phenomenal success in the period to date. Dombeya was the previous name [...]

This blog is not purely an exercise in vanity so I’m sitting here drinking the rather good Dombeya Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 (4½ Stars in the April issue of WINE magazine) and wondering how to get my Uniform Resource Locator further up the Google rankings. It appears that when you type in “What I drank last [...]

With the 2010 WINE magazine Shiraz Challenge set to take place next week, panel member James Pietersen and I decided to do a calibration exercise. We also invited Rianie Strydom, winemaker responsible for the Dombeya and Haskell labels, who agreed to include some of her pretty smart Shiraz that she has made recently. We tasted [...]