Meet Our Winemakers
Gordon and Nadia Newton Johnson are the husband-and-wife winemaking team with experience of over 30 vintages between them. Growing up around some of the Cape’s leading edge winemakers as family friends, Gordon was immersed in the culture but only followed it closely after university. Having finished an economics degree his more artistic leanings led him to explore wine as a creative medium. Having been hooked he was largely self-taught before taking over the reins of winemaking at Newton Johnson in 1999.
In 2004 Gordon and Nadia met during the harvest in the Hemel-en-Aarde. Nadia, herself the 6th generation of wine growers near Robertson, having previously earned a degree in Oenology & Viticulture at Stellenbosch and eventually joined as winemaker after two years in the Constantia Valley. They test and play out each other’s ideas with minute detail for improvement. They adore the classics and taste as much of Burgundy as they can lay their hands on.
Wine making Philosophy
There is much that can be said about the intelligence of a vineyard and its ability to embody personality in wine. The modern approach was to make sterile wines that were replicable and consistent in quality and flavour. Pinot noir is the ultimate tutor to bust up all the technical dogma associated with this. Force it in the tiniest way (i.e. additives, over extraction, blending) and it will inevitably end in disappointment. Season after season farming our own vineyards gave us a holistic understanding of the vineyard site and the means to allow the wine to follow a natural path. Experience with an individual vineyard is invaluable and ultimately enables you to discover the finest detail that makes it distinctive. Hence we make the wines with a soft hand, rejecting commercial additives, and in a manner that befits each and every vineyard.