Testalonga Baby Bandito Follow Your Dreams Carignan 2021

Testalonga Baby Bandito Follow Your Dreams Carignan, natural wine, fresh and precise with cherry and raspberry flavours. Balanced yet grippy. The grapes are hand harvested and then crushed and whole bunch naturally wild yeast fermented with only a smidge of SO2 at bottling. 100% malolactic fermentation. A light clarifying filtration was done but the wine is un-fined

‘Planted in 2001, bush vine (un-trellised), farmed organically. This is a block that is fairly vigorous for the dry soils of the Swartland and produces a good amount of high-quality grapes with very juicy large berries. We try keep as many leaves as possible to shade the block as it can suffer from sunburn.’

Craig says:’Baby Bandito is a project we started in 2015. We wanted to work with vineyards that deliver wines that can be drunk young yet still “over deliver” in quality one would expect from our most affordable wine. There was a heavy influence from street artists (the good ones, not just your drunk student defacing someone’s wall, unless it was good) in the labels and the idea of a “series” using different and bright colours. The names of the wines come from expressions that we use as if giving encouragement to a child. “Follow your Dreams” is a quote made famous by the street artist, Banksy, who says “All art is stolen” so we stole his quote. The photograph was taken by my brother Mark (with permission) whilst on holiday in Vietnam.’

Craig Hawkins is a young winemaker based in the Swartland, South Africa, where he rents about 11ha of vineyard.

Having travelled extensively throughout Europe, and then worked as wine maker for Lammershoek, he now makes makes a huge variety of different wines under his own Testalonga label. Each vintage is experimental and we think they're getting better each year. These are beautiful natural hand-crafted wines from low yielding vines, wild ferments and nothing added except a little SO2 at bottling in some but not all the wines.