Every winery has an origin story. Testalonga's begins with someone else's wine.
In 2007, Craig Hawkins was an intern at Roc d'Anglade in the Languedoc, sleeping in a tent pitched on a hillside so steep he woke up at the bottom of it every morning. One night, Rémy Pédréno opened a bottle from a tiny estate in Dolceacqua, in the far western corner of Liguria: a Vermentino from Antonio Perrino, fermented on its skins the way you'd make a red. It was orange. It had tannin, color, texture — everything a white wine wasn't supposed to have, and everything Hawkins had been looking for without knowing it.
Back home in South Africa, he went looking for the country's skin-contact whites and found there weren't any. So in 2008, working from a rented vineyard in the Swartland, he made one himself — a skin-macerated Chenin Blanc, widely credited as South Africa's first orange wine. Before releasing it, he asked Perrino for permission to borrow his nickname. Perrino — whose own estate is called Testalonga — laughed and agreed. The wine became El Bandito, a nod both to Testalonga the eighteenth-century Sicilian bandit and to the wine's outlaw status at home, where the certification authorities had no category for what Hawkins was making and, for a stretch of years, made his life genuinely difficult over it. The debt is right there on the label: a South African winery named for a Ligurian winemaker, in gratitude for a single bottle.
The Swartland suits the project. An hour north of Cape Town, it is dry, hot, and Mediterranean in character — Hawkins himself compares it to Sicily — moderated by Atlantic air on its western edge. His fruit comes from old, organically farmed bush vines: Chenin planted in 1972 on the decomposed granite of the Paardeberg, parcels of Muscat d'Alexandrie, Hárslevelű, Carignan, Cinsault, Syrah, Tinta Amarela scattered across granite and sandstone. The stated philosophy is almost a slogan in its simplicity — single grape, single soil — but the discipline behind it is real. Whole-bunch pressing, wild fermentations in open tanks, élevage in neutral foudres (some sourced from a local distiller and nearly fifty years old), nothing added beyond a small dose of sulfur at bottling on some cuvées, and on others not even that.
The range splits in two. El Bandito is the serious tier — Skin, the original skin-contact Chenin; Cortez; Sweet Cheeks; The Dark Side — single-vineyard wines of texture and intent. Baby Bandito is the approachable one, each wine named like encouragement to a child: Keep on Punching, Stay Brave, Chin Up, Follow Your Dreams. The labels, built from photographs and drawings Hawkins chooses himself, are some of the most recognizable in natural wine. It would be easy to mistake the whole thing for a branding exercise if the wines weren't so precise.
In 2015, Craig and Carla bought their own farm in the mountains at the Swartland's northern edge, near Piketberg, and named it Bandits Kloof. It was half-derelict when they arrived — leopards and baboons on the peaks above the house, boulders to clear before anything could be planted. The first vines went in around 2018, mostly Mediterranean varieties chosen for the climate rather than the market. It is the long game: a winemaker who started with borrowed fruit and a borrowed name, farming his own ground.
Two decades on from that bottle in the tent, Hawkins is to the Swartland something like what Perrino was to him — the reference point, the proof that the thing can be done. Which is roughly how these things are supposed to work.