El Bandito - I Am the Ninja 2024

From 2003 to 2014, South African born Craig Hawkins worked for several wine producers. However, in 2008 he started a parallel project with his wife, Carla, which they called TESTALONGA. It initially was started with a single wine, a skin macerated white from chenin blanc, and based on an idea that became a pillar in his thinking: wine made exclusively from grapes and nothing else. In 2015, they acquired a semi-abandoned property called Bandits Kloof, in the Swartland region, 170 km north of Cape Town, and the first harvest from this farm was in 2021.

Craig always tries to achieve two goals with his wines: the first is that the characteristics of the soil are shown in the grapes, and the second is that the bottled liquid expresses versatility of flavors and sensations to those who drink it. Therefore, in order to be able to meet these two requirements, he believes that there is only one way to go - organic farming. He therefore doesn’t use chemical or synthetic products in the vineyards, opting instead to use mulch in winter to promote moisture retention and soil health, thus mitigating the typically dry climate of the Swartland. He doesn’t use industrial yeasts in the cellar (some of the wines they do a light filtration on in certain years and wines they find a filtration is more beneficial to the wine and the idea they are trying to express in the wine) as his aim is to have his wines as authentic and unaltered as possible, in other words, to leave them as close to their natural form as possible.

Each type of wine that Craig makes comes from a specific vineyard and a specific soil, and he tries to express the particular characteristics of that terroir in every bottle. To complement the uniqueness that each vineyard possesses, and using his passion for the arts (Craig was an art student), he uses his creativity in the design and titles of all TESTALONGA labels, making them from photographs taken by himself/Carla and his brother, or any photos that end up in his hands. His aim is for his labels to arouse positive emotions in those who happen to look at them.

According to Craig’s description, TESTALONGA wines are simultaneously elegant and powerful. He substantiates this claim by saying that if you want to drink a bottle of TESTALONGA casually by the pool and just enjoy the wine, the bottle will easily disappear. On the other hand, if we want to sit at one table, with food, in the company of another person, and we want to think about the wine, then we will definitely find complexity, we will find a clear acidity, a salty freshness.