The Leleshwa Story
"This white wine is amazing. Nothing to improve, the bouquet of aromas is simply excellent."
After years of struggling to get it just right, 2015 is the year in which Leleshwa wines stand up and get noticed.
We are just completing a tour of the Leleshwa winery near Naivasha and the person behind this flattering comment is Stephane Alsac, the Export Director at Grands Vins de Gironde, one of the largest wine merchants in Bordeaux, France. Alsac is part of a French wine distributors delegation that have traveled to Kenya to promote their produce, but also to find out more about Kenya's first homegrown fermented grape juice.
"The Leleshwa vineyards started about 20 years ago more as an experiment that anything else", says Wikus Ventar, manager at Morendat farm, an expanse of land owned by the Kenyan Nut Company that sits just after Naivasha on the Nairobi-Eldoret highway.
It is a sunny Kenyan winter day, the long expanses of vines – mostly bare due to the fact that the harvest was in February and the vines have just been pruned to prepare them for the 2016 crop – look as gnarly and sturdy as they would in any vineyard in Italy or France. It's easy to imagine the plants burdened with grapes at harvest time and the wine pickers slowly but steadily making their way through them, as they clip each bunch by hand.
After the field visit is completed, the delegation heads to the winery to get a glimpse of where the magic happens. In order to make wine, the first step after harvest is to feed the grapes through a large funnel into a machine which presses them and pumps the juice into a chamber where they must sit for about 48 hours. The next step involves adding yeast for fermentation; the juice is left to ferment for about two weeks at which point it is filtered into a new tank, where it is left for up to six months to stabilise before bottling.
"The cold Kenyan nights make for amazing grapes", enthuses Ventar, who underlines how he can't understand why Kenyan supermarkets still stock so many imported wines when there is a perfectly good local option.
"Over the past few years we have made a few changes" says Nderitu, who came to work here directly after graduating in BioChemistry at JKUAT. "To begin with we only had a dry red but to satisfy the local palate we began to make a sweeter one. Our rosé has also become sweeter over time, although we are considering making two options to suit people's different preferences".
Nderitu saves the 2015 Sauvignon Blanc to last. This is without a doubt the wine that extolls the highest praise from the group of wine connoisseurs. Set to hit the shelves some time in August, the 2015 harvest is Ventar's pride and joy; he instructs the delegation to give him as honest an appraisal as possible, because he plans to enter it into the world-renowned Michelangelo Wine awards which will be held in South Africa at the end of August this year. "I wouldn't worry too much" smiles Alsac, "this wine is excellent and it's bound to be noticed by the judges". So there it is, watch out world, Kenyan wines are set to hit the stage with a bang!
