VINTAGE 2024

Seasonal climate and wine production goes hand in hand as everybody knows.  We as producers always wish for a “fairytale” weather pattern during a growing season, but sometimes the “fairy” turns into a “villain” when the weather turns out to bring challenges in terms of grape volume and/or quality.  For us on Normandie Est. 1693, the 2024 vintage however, was a beautiful fairytale!  Yes, the Western Cape as a province, was preceded by abnormally high rainfall during the 2023 winter.  Rainy conditions continued throughout spring, until rainfall ended abruptly by end November 2023.  The Western Cape experienced its worst landslides in more than 60 years on the mountain slopes all over the province.  On Normandie estate we were very fortunate and thankful to have had no such damage.

Despite many rainy days during flowering and berry set, we could see that we still had a good crop developing.  From a viticultural perspective, we adapted our canopy management and crop thinning approach to reach the desired berry size and grape volume per hectare for the each of our wines.  Following the unusually wet winter & spring, we had almost no rain for the following five months from Dec 2023 until April 2024.  Moderate temperatures brought ideal conditions for veraison and optimal ripening with a few hot days until harvest time.

2024 vintage on Normandie Est. 1693, was a magnificent one from a grape and wine quality perspective!  Perfect conditions during harvest gave us ample opportunity to harvest each lot at a unique ripeness level to bring all the wanted elements into the winery to create yet another extraordinary vintage of Eisen & Viljoen!  Our yield was 31 hectolitres per hectare.  The wine promises to be tight, concentrated, juicy and complex!

Release date to be announced.