Noble Hill Wine Estate

The Free Bacchus Story

Kristopher Tillery’s family are Americans who farmed in Nigeria, and when they bought Noble Hill in 2006 they knew little about growing grapes, so for some years consultants ran the vineyards and the cellar. Tillery had studied economics at Harvard and worked as a strategy consultant. When he began taking the winemaking over himself, he found that having no training was the useful part.

The wines being made on the farm in those early years followed the fashion of the time for big, very ripe reds, and he did not like them. He went the other way, with wild-yeast fermentations, gentler extraction for the reds, little new oak, and bottling without fining or filtration. The estate describes what came out as delicate, fresh wine with a mineral structure, and says it hopes you can taste the granite.

The vineyards grow in decomposed granite on the Paarl side of the Simonsberg, a mountain the estate says has made South Africa’s finest wines for more than three hundred years. The oldest block, Chenin Blanc planted in 1987, is a certified heritage vineyard under the Old Vine Project, which counts fewer than four in every hundred South African vineyards as old enough to qualify. Its grapes go into a wine called Simonskop.

Ecocert certifies Noble Hill to both the European and the American organic rules, and the two certificates cover different things. The EU certificate names the grapes and the wines one by one, from the Estate Reserve to the Simonskop, so in Europe the wine itself is certified organic. The US certificate covers the vineyards, from October 2024, and nothing in the cellar. The first vintages the EU certificate lists are 2023s, and the winery’s own notes for the 2022 Estate Reserve say its grapes were still in conversion.