A wine born from the desire to create the most powerful, yet elegant Shiraz in South Africa. A wine inspired by the world’s finest, most extreme wine growing and winemaking techniques. Crafted from the ancient soils of Africa – that wine is The Black Lion Shiraz.

The newly released 2016 vintage marks the 5th vintage release of the incomparable and boldly powerful The Black Lion Shiraz, now exclusively available from our cellar. This luxurious wine, embodied with rich, dark, velvety aromas, vows to exhibit the meticulous attention to detail which encapsulates the core of our viticulture philosophy here at De Toren. The Black Lion truly is the heirloom of years of winemaking in our continuous quest for perfection, and exhibits the immense passion and knowledge of our highly capable team.

This wonderfully multi-layered Shiraz exudes complexity, making this a remarkably balanced wine. It’s the masterful alchemy of only the finest grapes from distinctly unique terroirs, the Swartland, contributing to the wine’s raw power, and Stellenbosch, ensuring its indisputable elegance.

To produce South Africa’s most powerful and luxurious Shiraz, requires the best possible fruit, i.e. the most expressive grapes. Infra-red aerial imaging is used to specifically identify vines, then used to grow only 4 single bunches per vine, as supposed to the usual 32 bunches. Each bunch is individually nurtured, manicured and pruned by hand and following the hand-harvesting process, each berry is also destemmed by hand. The sorting and selecting of only the best berries is followed by barrel-fermentation, after which the wine is double aged in New French Oak barrels, for a total of 18 months.

A wine with a reputation that precedes it, so much so that annual client pre-bookings secure more than half of the mere 1 000 bottles available each vintage. Each one of the mere 1188 bottles of the phenomenal The Black Lion 2016 is individually labelled and numbered by hand and presented in a phenomenal handcrafted black wooden case that safely secures this opulent wine. A wine that can only be opened by its special key – truly a rare collectable…

This prestigious wine can either be enjoyed now or be cellared under the perfect conditions, as this wine has an ageing potential of over 4 decades.


“With an underlying elegance and an opulent palate, the whole is greater than the sum of its singular components. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever tasted. A true bucket list wine…”

– Charles Williams, Winemaker –