Week 5 Wine country

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Wed 14 Oct
Anybody that knows me really well will be aware that wine is one of my top ten favourite things. OK, it probably makes it into the top 5. Therefore I am in heaven here in the wine country, with hundreds of vineyards, wine farms and wine shops. When I went to dinner last night the wine list (that guaranteed that all the wines listed were just from this valley) ran to several pages. Overwhelmed with the choice I opted for the house dry, which was fabulous.

It is impossible to get just a glass of wine here, and if you order one you automatically get a small carafe which is a quarter bottle, and if you order a carafe you get a large one that is half a bottle. The price is astonishingly low too.

Montagu is a really pretty place and this morning it sparkled under a bright blue cloudless sky, with a midday temperature of 30 degrees C. That doesn’t feel too hot as its a very dry heat The sun is very strong so high factor protection or shade is required, so I sat in the sun for about an hour after breakfast but was sheltered by 10am. Shirley has satellite TV here, so watched a bit of Sky News this morning, which seemed quite weird.

Montagu is famed for its hot springs but when I walked up there its a very commercialised operation with ugly modern buildings marring the natural beauty of the place, which reminded me of the ones I have seen in Germany and Hungary. I didn’t bother but instead I lunched again in the rose gardens of the Montague Hotel to take advantage of the wifi hotspot and had a wonderful spa treatment at their Wellness Centre instead.



Thurs 15 Oct
Unfortunately part of this pretty town was washed away in the floods two years ago. Rather like the Boscastle, Cornwall incident, a massive storm sat right over the area with torrential rain causing the two rivers to overflow where they converged in town, sweeping thousands of tons of debris with it. They are still in the middle of clearing up the aftermath and loads of huge boulders are still strewn around the area.

Spent the day in and around the town including a visit to the famous Bird Tree which always contains hundreds of, well, birds. Its noisy and very smelly and I would imagine in the heat of the summer the stink will be overpowering, but the birds seem quite happy to sit, squawk and poop.

Shirley dropped me in Ashton at 3pm where I caught a Translux bus to Paarl. This bus was OK but some of the seats were permanently in the reclined position, so I had the head of the chap in front under my chin for most of the journey. It was another scenic trip through the mountains, passing Robertson and Worcester. Although the journey was under 2 hours it was 35 minutes late and I just caught Paul as he was leaving, having given up on me arriving. Paul, the owner of Erica Guest House drove me to Franschhoek and settled me into a lovely ensuite room. This is the second most expensive place in SA to live and is also the gourmet capital of the region, so the price of accommodation, food and drink is considerably higher than I have been paying recently.

The walk down the gentle hill into town took about 10 minutes and I had an early dinner at a small family restaurant. As it had started to rain and I was busting for a pee, that gentle hill seemed much more of a challenge when I was trying to go up it..

Fri 16 Oct
Franschhoek is one of the prettiest places I have seen. The valley is stunning and the whole area is well kept and reeks of money. Expensive ? Bien sur !

Got into town as soon as the shops opened and went immediately to the tourist information to try to book a wine tour. It turned out that I was on one sooner than I expected, as the best deal was to catch the La Rochelle Tours full day option that was passing by their office in 3 minutes time.

On the tour were an Ozzy pair (honeymooners), a Canadian couple and a British guy who was on a half day tour, plus our guide and we went to 5 wine estates or wine farms in total. Apparently the status of “estate” is only given when all the grapes are cultivated on the estate land and then picked, processed and bottled there too.

The morning was spent at 3 tastings, firstly at Solms where we had an interesting tour of the small museum there before trying 5 wines, including their Africana shiraz that is listed in the book “1001 wines to try before you die” - I don’t suppose God will wait until I have tried the others. This was where I got my first of two tongue tingles with the unusual sparkling shiraz called Solms-Astor Cape Jazz. It was so good I bought a bottle. My second tingle was after we had tried 5 wines at Noble Hill and we started trying their virgin olive oils - the peri peri flavour had quite a kick. More so than the chili one surprisingly. We moved on to Moreson where we had several very good champagnes and some seriously good wines. We were all quite merry as most of us were drinking all of the samples instead of splitting, so time for lunch at the amazing La Petite Ferme. The food was absolutely top notch, the views were breathtaking and no, we didn’t order wine.

I would have been quite happy to have stopped there, but on we went to two more tastings. The Grande Provence was very posh with its own helipad and immaculate grounds. They did have some very weird sculptures though as you can see from the top photo. The tasting bar was chic and we peeked in the window of the restaurant which looked very expensive. We tried 6 wines here but our palettes had turned to mush and even though we could see that these bottles were extremely expensive, highest priced of all todays, we could hardly tell them apart. It was even worse at the last stop, so bad that I cant even remember its name, but they did have another magnificent view here.

A lovely day with good dry weather. I stopped in the village on the way home and bought a few snacks for supper as I certainly didn’t want another meal or any more wine. Note to self - book only half day wine tastings in the future.

Sat 17 Oct
Learned something today - although cannabis (or dagga as its called here) is illegal, the Rastafarians are allowed to smoke it legally on 4 days a year over Easter. Its available on most street corners and I guess the police are either blind or tolerant as I saw some of the weed being cultivated amongst the wild shrubs around the Knysna area from the bus. If we could see them ...

Another fun thing is a certain type of ibis that fly around all over SA that has the loudest, grating call I have ever heard from a bird - makes you think you are being attacked by some kind of raptor from Jurrasic Park. They make you jump when they fly over your head and let out their call. However what’s amusing is that they only make a noise when they fly and are silent on land, so the locals say the birds make that sound because they are scared of flying - cute.

A glorious sunny day with blue skies, hot sun and a whisper of breeze. Spent most of the day around the town window-shopping in the wide rage of very pricey boutiques and stopped a couple of times for coffee or a coke at one of the may lovely cafes. I managed to get a bracelet fixed that I had bought in Cape Town, as the catch had become loose. Also visited a small farmers market and had a nose around the lovely food stuff on sale.

Lunch was kind of special. I had a Chefs meat and fish salad at Le Bon Vivant, which is a very famous restaurant that has won loads of awards. As you will see from the photo, it was made up of 5 separate tiny dishes and looked almost too good to eat - almost but not quite. Although there was not very much traditional salad stuff, the dish was made up of kingclip fish in the centre with crispy something on top and various dressed leaves beneath, including spinach and rocket. Top right was a large prawn with a tangy mayonnaise and tiny chopped vegetables, top left was smoked salmon roulard with a kind of cream cheese topping and a deep fried leaf, bottom left was fois gras and finally bottom right was a couple of pieces of kudu fillet sitting on shredded purple cabbage and dressed with fried parsley. Divine.

I will split this weeks blog as I am doing something special tomorrow. Had a couple of hours on a sun lounger in the shady garden by the pool with my book and a cheap supper .

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Comments

[Kim]

WTF?!
I now know why you couldn't taste the wine, you made good use of the extra crop growing didn't you?! LOL I want to try the Chocolate Block and I loved the wine named after the estate's dog. The area looks so much like Margaret River when Nan Pop and I went down even the flowers look like the local one's here. It's so pretty. Looking forward to seeing what you did next. X KIM