Boplaas

means the higher (bo) farm (plaas). The history of the owner family Nel goes back to the time when the Huguenots came to South Africa and the Nel family bought the Blaauwklippen farm in Stellenbosch in 1690. In 1880, the Nel family began producing brandy in Calitzdorp for export to England. 

In the 1970s, what the family describes as a cheap coincidence happened in Calitzdorp. Believing it to be Shiraz, Danie Nel planted Boplaa's Portuguese grape variety Tinta Barocca, which was first bottled as table wine and later as Cape Vintage in the 1980s.

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Cape Vintage
is the South African term for wines that are fortified during fermentation and are usually dark and heavy with a lot of natural residual sweetness. There are different stages of maturation, Cape Vintage Reserve is aged longer in oak barrels, Cape Ruby is more fruit-orientated and Cape Tawny is aged for a particularly long time in oak barrels.

 

Port wine
comes from Portugal's Douro Valley, one of the most beautiful and oldest wine-growing regions in the Douro, where wine has been produced for over 2000 years. The term port or port wine is a protected designation for wines from the Douro Valley in Portugal; other wines from other regions of Portugal may not be called port wine, even if they are produced using the same process as port wine. 

Port wine varieties are Touriga Franca, Touriga Nacional and Tinta Barroca, Portuguese grape varieties with small, thick-skinned fruit that give port wine its dark, dense colour and aroma. When making port wine, the winemaker adds wine distillate to the fermenting wine after about half of the natural sugar has fermented into alcohol. This stops the fermentation yeasts and the port retains its natural residual sweetness. A distinction is made between Ruby, Reserve and Tawny Port depending on the length of maturation in oak barrels.

 

Sherry
is a Spanish variety from the Jerez de la Frontera region, in which the wines are not fortified during fermentation but only after they have been fully matured, which is why sherry is always matured dry.

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Over the past ten years, Boplaas has received numerous awards for its Cape Vintages and as a wine producer overall. In 2017, Daniel Nel started producing whisky and his Boplaas Single Grain Whisky won the Michelangelo International Wine & Spirits Award 2018. In addition to whisky production, a highly acclaimed gin with 8 different citrus flavours is now also distilled.