The Swartland Bandit & the Orange Epiphany

The story of Testalonga begins with a tent, a gas stove, and a bottle of orange wine that rewired Craig Hawkins' brain. In 2008, while working for Rémy Pedreno at Roc d'Anglade in the Gard, southern France, Craig was sleeping on a hillside — every morning sliding to the bottom of his tent — and cooking on a camping stove. One night, Pedreno gave him a bottle of Antonio Perrino's wine from Dolceacqua in Liguria. The wine was called Testalonga — Perrino's nickname, derived from the Italian for "long head" — and it was orange: a white wine made like a red wine, with skin contact that transformed Vermentino into something Craig had never encountered. "It was my epiphany moment," he remembers. "It was what I had been looking for. It was a white wine, made like a red wine — and I thought, why is nobody doing this?"

Craig returned to South Africa and searched for skin-contact wines. He found none. That absence became his mission. He asked Antonio Perrino if he could borrow the name Testalonga for his own project; Perrino agreed. Craig also discovered there had been a bandit in Sicily called Testalonga — a rebel, an outlaw — and the El Bandito label was born. In 2008, while pressing his first wine — a skin-contact Chenin Blanc from the Observatory vineyard, Tom Lubbe's old vineyard — he met Dirk Niepoort. Niepoort, along with Dorli Muhr, became a lifelong friend and mentor. The wine was four weeks on skins, something no one in South Africa had attempted. A fellow winemaker tasted it and asked Craig how he planned to sell orange wine from the Swartland. Craig's heart sank. Then a friend put him in touch with Doug Wregg of Les Caves de Pyrene. Craig poured the wine at Terroirs in London. "They didn't say a word, and at the end they said, 'we like it, we'll take it all.' That's when I realised that I could maybe make a living from this."

Craig's path to that London table had been unconventional. He originally enrolled in game ranging and forestry — his childhood dream was to be a ranger — but started working in his brother Niel's vineyards for holiday and beer money. He discovered the transformation from vine to wine and never looked back. At university, he asked Niel who was the most innovative winemaker in South Africa. Niel said Eben Sadie. Craig called Sadie, got a harvest job, and worked for him for five years in the Swartland. From there, internships followed: with Stéphane Ogier in the Rhône, Dorli Muhr in Austria, Dirk Niepoort in Portugal, and Tom Lubbe at Domaine Matassa — where he immersed himself fully in organic viticulture. In 2010, Carla's father asked him to take over winemaking at Lammershoek, the family estate in the Paardeberg. Craig agreed on two conditions: that he could convert all vineyards to organics, and that he could continue making his own wines. He stayed until 2015, when Lammershoek was sold.

Carla Hawkins — Craig's wife and partner — is the co-pilot of Testalonga. Her family owned Lammershoek, and together with the Sadie family and other local farmers, they were instrumental in setting up the Maranatha Trust, a non-profit for community children living in poverty. Today, Craig and Carla live at Bandits Kloof, 100 kilometres north of the Paardeberg hub, in the Piketberg region of the Swartland. It is true rural Africa — leopards, caracal, aardvark, baboons, and Cape foxes roam the property. They work with the Cape Leopard Trust, tracking wildlife across 84 farms. Craig has unwittingly fulfilled his childhood dream of working with animals — while making some of the most distinctive wines in the southern hemisphere.

The winemaking philosophy at Testalonga has evolved significantly over fifteen years — from radical experimentation to pragmatic precision. In the beginning, Craig was idealistic and exploratory: his 2010 vintage saw two years of skin maceration and two years of ageing on double lees — "the wines were insane," he laughs. 2011 was his "dirty year," full of mistakes. By 2013, he had decided to create a linear focus across the range: wines of saltiness, acidity, and cleanliness, with very low volatile acidity. "Cellar hygiene is everything," he says now. "These days, the wines are very precise and focused. To do that, you need everything to be clean at every stage." The ethos remains the same — "a good wine doesn't need all the props to be held up" — but the execution has matured.

Craig seeks purity, precision, and brightness. He only works with vineyards that can produce high-quality grapes with relatively low pH, ensuring minimal need for cellar intervention. In the cellar, there is no added yeast, no enzymes, no acid. The whites are whole-bunch pressed and fermented in stainless steel, foudre, or small oak. The skin-contact whites — the orange wines that started it all — are destemmed and fermented on skins for 7–14 days in wrapped open-top fermenters before pressing to old wood. The reds are fermented whole-bunch with a high proportion of stems, which Craig uses "purely as a tool of perception" — adding tannic structure and the perception of acidity to counterbalance the naturally higher pH of black grapes in a warm climate. Maceration is gentle and brief — usually 3–4 days — after which the wine is pressed and finishes fermentation in stainless steel before transfer to old 400/500L oak barrels. "Never put a red wine with a bit of sugar into a barrel in South Africa," he warns. "I've burnt my finger too many times."

Sulphur is treated with nuance rather than dogma. Since the beginning, Craig has used either no sulphites at all or a maximum of 20 ppm — an extremely low level. "Sulphites aren't something that will improve your wine, they're not going to make it better. But they can hold something together in the wine at a certain point, and keep that consistent." From 2018 onwards, he experimented with gentle filtration, and he won't shy away from adding sulphur if the wine needs it. "If the wine can't last six months in bottle to tell the story, what good is the story itself?" This pragmatic evolution — from purist to precise — has produced wines that are cleaner, more focused, and more consistent, without sacrificing their natural identity.

The labels are as distinctive as the wines. All artwork and photography are created by Craig or Carla, or drawn from work that has inspired them. The El Bandito labels change every year, and the back-label notes carry personal meaning and dedications — friends lost to suicide, moments of doubt, expressions of gratitude. "There are always these small, personal emotional comments on the back label," Craig says. "They might not make sense to anyone but me and perhaps a very small handful of people, but it's not just about selling wine. It's about your connection to the people that have brought you here." The Baby Bandito labels, launched in 2015, use bright colours and street-art aesthetics — names like "Follow Your Dreams" and "Stay Brave" that encourage as much as they describe. Every bottle is a piece of Craig's life, as well as a piece of the Swartland.

To understand Testalonga, one must understand the concept of the pragmatic pioneer — a viticultural identity that begins with radical idealism and matures into disciplined precision. Craig Hawkins did not set out to make natural wine for a market; he fell into it. "I didn't know about natural wine — I fell into it. I wasn't making my wines to be part of a market, it just happened." The first skin-contact Chenin Blanc was an act of personal curiosity, not commercial calculation. The early years were wild — two years on skins, double lees, experiments that bordered on the insane. But by 2013, Craig had decided that focus mattered more than shock. He wanted a linear range: saltiness, acidity, cleanliness, low volatile acidity. The pragmatism that followed was not a betrayal of natural wine but a deepening of it. "You have to see ball, hit ball. That's the way I work. I am very pragmatic. I was very idealistic in the beginning — you need to be, as then you find a path. You make mistakes, admit your mistakes to yourself, and then move on and don't make the same mistakes again."

The ranger vigneron identity that Craig embodies is equally central. His childhood dream was not to make wine but to work with animals — to be a game ranger, to track leopards across the African bush. At Bandits Kloof, he has unwittingly fulfilled both dreams simultaneously. The farm is not merely a vineyard; it is a wildlife reserve where viticulture and conservation coexist. Leopards, caracal, aardvark, baboons, and Cape foxes roam the property. Camera traps capture their movements. The Cape Leopard Trust works across 84 farms, including Bandits Kloof, to understand how these animals interact with agriculture. Craig's eyes see every vine, but they also see the aardvark holes, the leopard scat, the caracal tracks. He is not merely a farmer; he is a steward of a landscape — a vigneron who understands that the health of the vineyard is inseparable from the health of the ecosystem that surrounds it.

The future of Testalonga is tied to the maturation of Bandits Kloof — the continued organic cultivation of the estate's own vines, the release of new cuvées from Grenache, Mourvèdre, Macabeo, and the future plantings of Frappato and Hárslevelű, the refinement of Craig's pragmatic cellar practices, and the strengthening of his position in the natural wine markets of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The El Bandito range will continue to express the single-vineyard precision of the Paardeberg and Piketberg. The Baby Bandito range will continue to offer joy and accessibility. And the Bandits Kloof range will emerge as the truest expression of Craig and Carla's vision: wines made from vines they planted themselves, on soils they own, in a landscape they share with leopards.

In an age of industrial wine production, of chemical agriculture and homogenised taste, Testalonga stands as a compelling alternative — not because it rejects South Africa but because it has embraced a different South Africa, one that values old bush vines over new plantations, indigenous yeasts over laboratory inoculation, skin contact over sterile freshness, whole-bunch fermentation over destemming, granite and shale over fertile alluvium, early picking over alcohol accumulation, wildlife over monoculture, and the specific voice of the Swartland over the standardised replication of a global style. Craig and Carla Hawkins are not merely making wine; they are tracking a revolution — from the first orange Chenin in 2008 to the first Bandits Kloof release in 2021, from the London table at Terroirs to the leopard cameras in the Piketberg, from the idealism of youth to the precision of maturity. The Ligurian epiphany, the Swartland revolution, the orange pioneer, the ranger vigneron, the pragmatic evolution, and the name that has meant natural South African wine for nearly two decades: all united in one bottle, one estate, one unanswerable argument for the possibility of authentic, place-specific, creatively evolving artisan wine at the southern tip of Africa.