Mullineux Old Vines Chenin Blanc 2022

I opened a bottle of this last month on a back patio in Tarrytown while a client walked through a finished cellar for the first time. He took one sip, looked at the bottle, asked where it was from, and then asked me to order a case. That is Mullineux. Chris and Andrea Mullineux farm old bush vines in the Swartland, a stretch of hot, granite-soiled country about an hour north of Cape Town. The vines are gnarled, ungrafted, and some of them were planted before the Mullineux family arrived. That matters. Old vines make more concentrated fruit and less of it. Less quantity, more depth. You taste it immediately. Stone fruit and honeycomb on the nose, but what gets you is the texture. Wet chalk, sea salt, a slight waxiness that most Chenin does not have. The finish is long and mineral. It drinks like Vouvray if Vouvray had spent a year at the gym. At $28-35 it is one of the most ridiculous white wine values in the world and South Africa is still not charging what this quality is worth. Buy it now. In five years people will be writing articles pretending they discovered it.