Why it matters
The producer
May de Lencquesaing spent close to three decades running Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, one of the Médoc's most competitive second growths in Pauillac. When she finally bought her own farm in 2003, it was on the lower slopes of Simonsberg Mountain in Stellenbosch, South Africa. She was seventy-eight.
The estate she built is not a retirement project. Glenelly's winery, completed in 2009, was engineered around a single principle: move juice and wine by gravity alone. Four underground floors allow fruit to descend through the building at each stage of production, from sorting through fermentation to barrel ageing, without pumps or mechanical pressure. No acidification. No commercial yeast. The wines ferment on wild cultures from the estate's own atmosphere.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Stellenbosch is South Africa's most planted serious red wine appellation, a wide basin of mountain-facing farms south-east of Cape Town. Simonsberg Mountain forms the appellation's eastern edge. Its lower slopes offer altitude above the valley floor and the cooling influence of elevation without the exposure of the summit, giving grapes a longer growing window and retaining the natural acidity that de Lencquesaing's no-acidification policy depends on.
The Simonsberg address means Glenelly sits inside the Stellenbosch Wine of Origin ward, a designation that appears on the Estate Reserve label. For a cellar philosophy built around leaving the wine alone, the choice of site matters: cool mornings, moderate afternoon warmth, and enough elevation to slow ripening are what make wild yeast fermentation and zero acid addition workable rather than risky.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
Glenelly farms red and white varieties on Simonsberg's lower slopes, though specific block counts, clone selections, and vine ages are not confirmed in detail. What shapes the wines most visibly is what happens after harvest.
The gravity-flow winery descends four underground floors into the hillside. Fruit arrives at the top, moves down through sorting and crushing, then continues to fermentation vessels and barrel storage below. No pump pressure is applied at any transfer point. The cellar team uses wild, naturally occurring yeasts for fermentation rather than inoculated commercial strains. The wild fermentation is slower and less predictable than cultured-yeast fermentation and produces a broader range of aromatic compounds.
Wines to know
The range in view
The range covers two named tiers.
The Glass Collection is the entry range, drawing on the estate's broader fruit selection for red blends and white wines at a lighter price point. It is intended as an everyday set of bottles from Simonsberg, accessible without demanding deep familiarity with the estate.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
The Estate Reserve Chardonnay is the right first bottle. It is a Stellenbosch Chardonnay from a cellar that refuses to correct what the vineyard delivers: no acidification, no commercial yeast, gravity handling from arrival to bottling. The 2022 nose is pineapple, apple, and mild mango with a background of oak. The palate is fruit-driven and textured, with the richness that wild fermentation adds and the natural freshness that a well-placed Simonsberg site can hold without acid intervention. Start here to understand what de Lencquesaing built and why the cellar philosophy matters in the glass.