The three friends who named a wine after a farmyard

There is a moment in every new wine venture where somebody says the sensible thing. Put the grape name in large letters, the region underneath, keep the label quiet and let the shelf do the selling. The three friends behind Two Dogs a Peacock and a Horse did the opposite, and they have been living with that decision ever since.

The trio are Kevin Swart, Jacques Wentzel and Raymond Ndlovu, who started Black Elephant Vintners in Franschhoek as an idea between friends, each of them bringing a different skill to the table. The name is a piece of wordplay: Swart and Ndlovu stitched together to make Black Elephant, with Jacques as the vintner of the three. Once you know that, the rest of the range makes sense.

A name that loses you the easy sale

Think about what a label like this gives up. A shopper walking a supermarket aisle with half a plan for supper is scanning for one word, and it is not "peacock". Wines called things like Three Men in a Tub With a Rubber Duck or The Power of Love do not get picked up by accident.

So the trade is a real one. You forfeit the customer who buys on autopilot, and in exchange you get remembered by the customer who asks a question. That only works if the person answering the question has something worth saying, and if the wine in the glass backs the story up.

Which is the bit that tends to get missed about Black Elephant. The humour is on the outside. The decisions underneath it are careful, unglamorous and quite technical.

Three people and no chief winemaker

From the start the three worked as a genuine team rather than one winemaker with assistants in tow, and they call themselves the Rebels of the Vine. It sounds like marketing until you consider what shared decision-making actually means during harvest, when fruit is arriving and somebody has to call it.

One palate in charge is faster. It gives you a house signature, a clean line of authority and nobody to argue with at eleven at night. Three people deciding together is slower and messier, and it means every choice has to be defended out loud rather than simply felt.

What you gain is a wine that has been questioned from three directions before it goes in the bottle. There is good music playing in the cellar while it happens, which tells you something about how they would rather work than how they think they ought to.

They build the wine rather than simply make it

The fruit is not from one tidy home vineyard. The team draws on sites scattered across the Franschhoek valley, choosing parcels for what each one contributes: freshness here, texture there, structure somewhere else. For their Méthode Cap Classique they go further still, out to Elgin, the cooler pocket near the coast where slower ripening builds finer acidity.

That is more work than the alternative. More vineyards to walk, more relationships to keep, more small lots to keep track of in the cellar, and no single-estate romance to put on the back label. It also means no hiding place: if a parcel is dull, blending it in shows up immediately.

The winemaking itself stays deliberately light-handed, letting the parcels speak instead of covering them with heavy oak. Restraint is a decision too, and a harder one to sell than a flashy one.

The choice you can actually taste

Here is the decision that shapes this bottle more than any other: extended lees contact. After fermentation the wine is left to rest on its spent yeast cells rather than being cleaned up and hurried into bottle.

What that does is soften the sharp edges and lay a creamy, almost tactile weight across the middle of the palate. The variety's lifted aromatics and bright acidity are still there, but they arrive wrapped in something rounder and more generous. It is why a glass turns into a second glass without much discussion.

And it asks something of them. Lees ageing means tank space occupied and time spent, and it means walking away from the lean, nervy, purist style that a lot of South African Sauvignon Blanc is judged against. They chose charm over austerity on purpose, knowing some drinkers want the razor instead.

Where that generosity earns its keep

Texture is what lets a Sauvignon Blanc sit down at the table rather than just standing about beforehand. Seared scallops with pea purée are the obvious test: a leaner wine cuts straight through them, while this one has enough mid-palate to meet the sweetness of the scallop halfway.

Crab cakes with a herby mayonnaise work for the same reason, the creaminess in the glass answering the creaminess on the plate. A Thai green chicken curry with jasmine rice is the other direction entirely, where the roundness takes the heat of the chilli in its stride and the acidity resets everything before the next mouthful.

August in Britain being what it is, this is a bottle for whichever afternoon turns out warm enough, ideally with the bank holiday weekend in mind. If the weather turns properly and you want something a shade darker, we have written about a red for the last of the British summer too, and the Fox and Flamingo Rosé comes from the same three friends and the same sense of humour. The 750ml goes quickly among four people, which is the highest compliment a wine like this gets.

If that sounds like your kind of Sauvignon Blanc, the one that has been given time and texture rather than sharpened to a point, Two Dogs a Peacock and a Horse is a fine introduction to how Black Elephant Vintners think. It suits the host who would rather pour than pontificate, and it belongs next to scallops, crab cakes or a green curry on a warm evening.