No visit to the Cape is complete without a day of wine tasting on the estates in one of the wineland areas. We chose the Stellenbosch area as there are a lot of the estates we know in that area and it is also closer to Cape Town than the other wineland areas. We started off in Stellenbosch by visiting "Oom Saamie se Winkel" a famous shop selling all sorts of interesting South African things ranging from fine wines to bric-a-brac and even homemade rusks, fudge and "koeksisters" (sweet, platted dough fried and dipped in syrup, very good but only eat one!). After a cup of coffee at the café at the back of the shop it was time to head for the wine estates.
We started with Delheim as it has a restaurant, cellar tours and wine tasting. We had a really good lunch sitting outdoors with a view of the gardens and winelands. Then it was off to the cellars to be taken on a tour starting with standing on the edge of the vine growing area, then moving into the processing, bottling and storage areas and finally ending up back in the cellars to taste the products of the tour. We tasted quite a lot of the wines, both white and red, ranging from "OK" to "Fantastic!" As it was both David's and Taahier's first visit to the winelands they decided that it was not "wine tasting" but "wine drinking", needless to say they ended the day in a fairly drunk state (-: David bought himself a bottle of Delheim's exceptionally good "Grand Reserve".
The second wine estate we visited was Le Bonheur as Annie has fond memories of their Blanc Fume, now relabelled as a Sauvignon Blanc but still equally delicious. After tasting a few of their wines we had a little walk into the garden so that Annie could look at a hybrid orange-lemon-naartjie tree and steal some of the fruit. It looked good, was easy to peel but was THE SOUREST fruit any of us had ever tasted!
By this time it was fairly late in the day so we changed our plans slightly and, as our final wine estate, chose Kanonkop. This was by no means a compromise of quality, merely the convenience of proximity. Kanonkop is another well-known good quality estate that produced wines that were always far too expensive to buy as a student or in my early working days. They are one of the estates that produce only red wines. We were given tastes of two of them, a Pinotage and a Cabernet Sauvignon. Both of them were very good and, on principle I had to buy a bottle of the Cabernet.
We completed the day with a cup of coffee back in Stellenbosch at a coffee-shop called "The Mug and Bean", a South African chain that serves very good coffee. It was then time we headed back to Sea Point and our apartment for a well-earned relaxed evening.
No visit to the Cape is complete without a day of wine tasting on the estates in one of the wineland areas. We chose the Stellenbosch area as there are a lot of the estates we know in that area and it is also closer to Cape Town than the other wineland areas. We started off in Stellenbosch by visiting "Oom Saamie se Winkel" a famous shop selling all sorts of interesting South African things ranging from fine wines to bric-a-brac and even homemade rusks, fudge and "koeksisters" (sweet, platted dough fried and dipped in syrup, very good but only eat one!). After a cup of coffee at the café at the back of the shop it was time to head for the wine estates.
We started with Delheim as it has a restaurant, cellar tours and wine tasting. We had a really good lunch sitting outdoors with a view of the gardens and winelands. Then it was off to the cellars to be taken on a tour starting with standing on the edge of the vine growing area, then moving into the processing, bottling and storage areas and finally ending up back in the cellars to taste the products of the tour. We tasted quite a lot of the wines, both white and red, ranging from "OK" to "Fantastic!" As it was both David's and Taahier's first visit to the winelands they decided that it was not "wine tasting" but "wine drinking", needless to say they ended the day in a fairly drunk state (-: David bought himself a bottle of Delheim's exceptionally good "Grand Reserve".
The second wine estate we visited was Le Bonheur as Annie has fond memories of their Blanc Fume, now relabelled as a Sauvignon Blanc but still equally delicious. After tasting a few of their wines we had a little walk into the garden so that Annie could look at a hybrid orange-lemon-naartjie tree and steal some of the fruit. It looked good, was easy to peel but was THE SOUREST fruit any of us had ever tasted!