Wine of the Week 62: Testalonga Mielie Green 2025

“Mielie is our daughter Camilla’s nickname,” shares winemaker Craig Hawkins at a tasting of Testalonga’s Baby Bandito and Mielie wines, with the more-premium El Bandito range to follow in a few months. Behind him, the buzz of Bree Street drifts in, joining the sizzle from Tomson’s lunch prep.

When Craig and Carla Hawkins launched Testalonga in 2008, they set out to do things differently. Their first wine was a four-week skin-macerated chenin blanc, which pushed against South African convention at the time. In 2015, they bought Bandits Kloof, a 135-hectare off-grid farm at the foot of the Olifantsberg in northern Swartland.

These days, Testalonga sources only organic, dry-farmed grapes from vineyards characterised by low pH, granite or sandstone soils. The wines are all made without commercial yeast, enzymes or acid additives.

Simple but colourful

The labels are invariably colourful and a little irreverent; Craig designs them himself. “I love pink,” he admits. And they always put a quote by Camilla on the side of the bottle. This year it’s: “Oh Biscuits” from Bluey.

The Mielie range, with its bright-yellow corn graphic, was created for the US market. “They couldn’t say mielie, so I put it phonetically on the label: ‘mee-lee’. They thought it meant corn in a bottle,” he laughs.

The wine came home, and South Africans embraced it immediately. “It’s an emblem of our heritage.” The winemaking is kept simple. “A bit of foudre, a bit of stainless steel. I think it has real tension and it over-delivers at the price. It’s as pure a Swartland chenin as we can make. I push the gross lees as much as possible to get texture and that salty edge.

“If I put this in a black-and-white label with Latin writing and a double-barrel surname, I could probably sell it for more,” he jokes.

A blend of vineyards

It’s also the first wine they’ve made under the Testalonga brand that isn’t single-vineyard. “We created the Mielie brand as a home for our farm’s younger vineyards. We don’t just want to pump out wine. The farm is special to us; we want to respect the flow of things.”

The chenin has a sibling, the Mielie Grenache. The vineyard was planted in 2018. “The year my daughter was born, another reason we called it Mielie. She’s very proud of that block; every time we drive past, she says it’s her vineyard.”

Testalonga Mielie Green 2025

A snapshot of the Swartland for 2025. Fresh and stony, embroidered with chamomile flowers, crystal moss, scented grass. Bones of crystal frame green apple, lemon pith and iodine. Yet for all its angular clarity, it’s cushioned by soft, velvety brushstrokes of lees, finishing on a rounded note of yellow peach.

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