CONDE

Stellenbosch,  South Africa

Stark-Condé Wines is a family-run winery making hand-crafted wines using tried-and true traditional methods. Our total production is less than 3000 cases, making us one of South Africa's few true boutique wineries.
Meticulous viticulture, selected harvesting, grape-sorting, small-batch fermenting, careful barrel maturation; these are our guiding philosophies. We are trying to make carefully crafted wines that speak with personality of a particular place.
All of our wines are made from grapes from our own "Oude Nektar" farm vineyards in Jonkershoek Valley in Stellenbosch. In addition to being viticulturally ideal, they are also pretty spectacular visually! Vineyard elevation range from between 200 to 500 metres above sea level and we have a range of aspects which give us a correspondingly broad range of fruit characteristics.
Our soils are decomposed granite over clay with a range of textures from light gravel to quite stoney.

Jonkershoek Valley is a small ward within Stellenbosch and shows unique characteristics. It is a high winter rainfall area: deep in the valley gets over 2000 mm per year and our own historical average is about 1000 mm, nearly double the Stellenbosch average.
On the negative side, Jonkershoek often gets strong South Easterly winds in the summer, but these tend to cut down on the incidence of disease and also serves to hold down the yields.
You are not likely to come across a Jonkershoek Ward wine very often: there are only a handful of farms (of which ours is the largest) and a smaller number of producers: Neil Ellis, le Riche, Klein Gustrouw, and Lanzerac. Good company!
We produce only red wines. All wines are made with similar, exacting, traditional techniques: hand-sorting, open-top fermentations, hand punchdowns and manual basket pressing.

The Condé wines (named for the winemaker, José Conde) are single-vineyard wines made from our best vineyard blocks. Currently, we have only released a Cabernet Sauvignon, but from the 2002 vintage, we will also have a Shiraz. The Stark wines (named for Franciska Stark, now deceased family matriach) are varietally-driven wines blended from more than one of our vineyards. They are given the same hand treatment as the Condé wines, they simply differ philosophically.

See Conde wines we sell

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