Welcome to the quirky world of Flagstone with this juicy and fruity blend. Longitude is uniquely South African in character, making it both complex, accessible and intriguing.
Winemaker Notes
Our ancient soils and equable, warm climate happily conspire to grow soft-structured, juicy red wines that taste different from the rest of the world. The essence of our Longitude is painstaking blending, always with Pinotage as a component. We want to accentuate a unique South African combination of accessibility and complex diversity. Longitude must taste juicy and fruity. It must feel soft, but have intriguing, lingering tannins and flavour, and it must offer unbeatable value for money.
What’s in the name
Dave Sobel's book, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time recounts the story of John Harrison, an 18th century clockmaker, responsible for creating the first chronometer sufficiently accurate to be used to determine a ship's longitude at sea.
While latitude could be found using the sun's altitude at noon and tables giving the sun's declination for the day, longitude proved a far more specious calculation. Dead reckoning proved fatally inaccurate on long voyages, so until a reliable longitude calculation became available, an indirect route, not always utilising favourable winds, and increasing the voyage by sometimes weeks, was the only accurate means of navigating to a destination.
It was John Harrison who created an accurate chronometer, perfecting a watch over four decades that would win him the prize provided by the Longitude Act of 1714. The introduction of this chronometer changed the face of naval navigation allowing mariners to find their way across the seas. If you could keep accurate time you could find your longitude at sea, no matter where you are.
In order to set one's chronometer at port ship captains kept a beady eye on a harbour’s time ball. The building depicted on the front of the label is the Time Ball Tower which stands above our old barrel maturation tunnel.
A time ball drops at a predetermined time to enable sailors to set or check their marine chronometers from the ships, enabling them to then calculate longitude while at sea.
Longitude is Flagstone's way finder wine, a place where people enter the quirky world of Flagstone.