What is the Blend Your Own Wine experience at Excelsior?

The best hour at any Robertson cellar door. They sit you at a bench with the separate component wines — usually Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Shiraz — a measuring cylinder, and no instructions beyond your own taste. You build a red, bottle it, cork it, label it, take it home. It's a proper hands-on session, not a demonstration you watch, and it's a gift with a group. Book ahead — it runs by appointment.

Do you need to book to visit Excelsior?

For the standard tasting, no — walk in and taste. For the Blend Your Own session or any group, yes, book through the estate's website. Robertson fills up over the December–January holidays and around the valley's wine festivals, so if you're travelling in season, reserve the bench ahead of time.

What is Excelsior best known for?

Punching above its price. Excelsior is one of Robertson's bigger export cellars, and its Cabernet Sauvignon has become a widely stocked, reliable everyday Cape red abroad — the kind you buy by the case. But the reason to actually drive out is the blending bench, which is what makes the cellar door itself worth the detour.

Where is Excelsior and does it fit a Robertson day out?

It's near Ashton, at the eastern end of the valley on the Breede River — an easy add to a Robertson wine day. Pair it with the Chardonnay houses further up the R60, a long lunch, and the river-valley drive, and you've got the day.

Excelsior Estate

Most estates want you to admire the wine. Excelsior wants you to make it.

That's the thing to know before you drive out here. On a stretch of the Breede River near Ashton, at the eastern end of the Robertson valley, the de Wet family run a farm that was once a racehorse stud — and they'll sit you down at a bench and let you blend your own bottle of red. The wines are honestly some of the best value in the Cape. The experience is the rarest thing at any cellar door in the country. The two don't usually come together. Here they do.

The stud that became a wine farm

Start with the horses, because they never quite left. The de Wets have farmed this stretch of the Breede for generations, and the property's past as a racehorse stud runs right through the place — range names that nod to bloodlines, a whole sensibility built around pedigree and consistency. The stables gave way to vines long ago. But the farm still thinks like a breeder: get the ground right, get the line right, do it again next year.

What stayed constant is the family's grip on it. Plenty of Robertson fruit vanishes anonymously into co-ops and supermarket brands. The de Wets kept their name on the bottle and built an export book around it — a farm big enough to matter commercially, still run as a family concern. That's the reason the wine stays cheap and the welcome stays personal. The two are the same fact.

Lime, sun, and a river

Robertson is built on lime. The valley's soils run unusually high in calcium — the quirk that first made this racehorse country (strong bones) and later made it wine country. That same lime gives the whites their nerve and the reds a firm backbone. Warm days ripen the fruit all the way; cool nights spilling off the mountains hold the acid in. Ripe and generous, but never jammy — the district's signature.

Excelsior sits low, close to the river, which takes the edge off the heat and keeps water on tap in a dry region. No one here is pretending it's a cool-climate estate. It's a sun-country farm making the most of a warm site, and the wines are honest about exactly that: round, fruit-forward, easy to say yes to.

The wines

Cabernet is the calling card. Excelsior's Cabernet Sauvignon has become one of the more widely stocked everyday Cape reds abroad — blackcurrant and plum, enough structure to read as a proper Cabernet, and a price that makes it a Tuesday bottle rather than an occasion. It built the export book, and it's still the wine people mean when they say Excelsior.

The trick here isn't one great bottle. It's a lot of very drinkable ones, priced like a mistake in your favour.

The whites lean on Robertson's Chardonnay heritage — those river-valley limes giving a citrus-fresh, lightly wooded Chardonnay — with Sauvignon Blanc and a Viognier rounding out the bench. Step up a tier from the everyday range and you find the de Wets' more serious reds, more oak, tighter selection, a look at what the site can really do. The through-line never changes: more wine than the number suggests.

Blend Your Own Wine

This is the reason to come, and it's worth being specific about why. At the blending bench they hand you the component wines, a measuring cylinder, and free rein. You taste each variety alone. You decide how much Cabernet spine you want against Merlot flesh and Shiraz spice. You build the blend, bottle it, cork it, label it, and it's yours.

Almost every "experience" at a Cape cellar door is a guided tasting with nicer lighting. This one isn't. It takes the abstract idea — why blends exist, what each grape brings — and puts it in your hands. Bring a group and it becomes a shared project instead of a passive sip-and-nod, the kind of hour people remember long after they've forgotten which estate had the view. Skip the standard tasting-and-go here. Book the bench.

Visiting

Easy, unpretentious, no ceremony. Excelsior sits near Ashton at the valley's eastern end, a short hop off the R60 that strings the Robertson estates together — an obvious stop on a Robertson wine day. The standard tasting is relaxed and walk-in friendly; the blending session and any larger group need arranging ahead. The valley fills up over the December–January holidays and around the wine festivals, so reserve if you're travelling in season, and check the estate's own site for current arrangements before you set out.