Wine tour day

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After brekkie today we were collected by the tour company for our wine tour. We went via another hotel and picked up another couple - young honeymooners from Brazil. On our way out of the city we passed many shanty towns - hits amade out of corrugated steel but with satellite dishes on top! We also saw a number of unfinished flyovers on the motorway, flyovers that will never be finished.

Our first stop was a small town called Stellenbosch, where we found the oldest house still standing in South Africa, with its thatched roof, now part of the museum. So many of the names are Dutch in origin, but the village looked French, with the giant oak trees down the avenues. Even out in the country the garden walls have either rolls of barbed wire or strands of electrically charged wire (As they did in Victoria Falls, too). In this town (and others too) there are men with high-vis vests standing in the roads. Apparently you negotiate a fee with these guys after you park your car and they will see that it remains safe, not broken In to, or stolen.

Next stop was a huge winery where we were given a tour of part of their huge cellars before having a tasting. Their wines were lovely, including a sparkling wine made only from Chardonnay grapes, but they also made a Baileys type of drink with a caramelly flavour “Wild Africa” which we really liked.

We then drove through the wine country to a different area with a very French style - Franschhoek, “French corner”. We were met out in the car park by an attendant with an extended golf buggy that took us up to the winery. Here we did wine and chocolate tasting. They had paired flavoured chocolates with really nice wines that we enjoyed. We wouldn’t have thought to consume them together, but these ones went welol. The choc that matched the Shiraz was a cinnamon choc, so bought a couple of blocks. We were then taken into town where we could have lunch. Tom and I decided to go to a French restaurant, where he had stroganoff (?), and I had mussels cooked in cream, wine and garlic.

After lunch we continued on to our third and final winery where we had wines made from grape varieties we’d never heard of, and a sparkling wine I couldn’t drink. The wines were paired with particular cheeses. With that finished we made our way back in to the city where We had time for a nap before dinner!

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