Advertisement
Published: October 17th 2012
Edit Blog Post
Having checked out of our apartment in Cape Town, we drove our of the city towards the Winelands. On the way out of the city we passed Khayelitsha, the notorious township, which is reportedly the largest in South Africa. The highway out of Cape Town en route to the airport cuts through the township and a brief glance inside revealed living conditions from a different world to where we had spent the last week.
Before long we reached Stellenbosch, a pretty little town, which is the second oldest European settlement after Cape Town. This area of the Western Cape is a world renowned wine producing region and there are hundreds of wineries scattered around where you can taste some of their wines. We left Stellenbosch in the direction of Franschhoek, but en route stopped at the Delaire Graff Wine Estate.
This was an extremely fancy place and the landscape was beautiful. We were lucky again with the weather, as the sun shone all day. We had two tasters here, with Dad embarrassing us, by going for a red wine on his first taste - apparently you take a white wine first to clean your palate. Before we left, they
gave us a menu of wines offering to ship home a crate for us if we wanted. This was definitely a very high end place.
We reached Franschhoek at around lunch time and checked into the Franschhoek Travellers' Lodge. They arranged for Brad, a wine tasting guide, to take us of a tour of some of the local wineries. Brad first took us to the Boekenhoutskloof Winery. This was a fairly big winery and produces the Porcupine Ridge wine, which is very famous all over South Africa and beyond.
After this we went to what is known as a boutique winery. This essentially means it is a small winery and we went tothe family run Stony Brook. We were served by Joy who runs the winery with her husband. Listening to the detail and effort put into every bottle of wine, gave me a new appreciation of the whole process. They were very proud of the way they were a small family run winery, with one wine called 'Max' named after their dog and another called the 'Ghost Gum' after a tree of the same name located just behind their house.
Afterwards, we went to two bigger
wineries called Rickety Bridge and Mont Rochelle. These were also very enjoyable, but perhaps didn't have the charm of Stony Brook. Brad was also an interesting character to talk to. Originally from Durban, he had moved out to the Western Cape, as he sought a better quality of life. He was quite open about South Africa's past under apartheid and what his thoughts were on the future. He was the first South African we had been able to talk to about these topics so far.
Franschhoek itself is a very quiet town, as we saw when we went out for some dinner that night, when I had a nice Springbok steak. There was absolutely no issue about walking around at night time and my impression was that very little has changed in this area in the post apartheid era. Although, one thing that has surely changed for the better is the end of the practice of paying black and coloured labourers in wine.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.068s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 11; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0379s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb