A Day in the Cape Winelands

On Tuesday, we toured the beautiful Cape Winelands and made detailed explorations of two particular properties from the more than 700 wineries in the Cape area. Our guide Alan had chosen Fairview Wineries and the Delaire Graff Estate as the main venues of the day. The tastings were punctuated by a fine lunch at Delaire Graff Estate Restaurant. We also toured the historic town of Stellenbosch and stopped in at Amani Vineyards, which is owned by a friend of mine’s father, and run by his sister.

Some of you may have seen the wine of Fairview Wineries in the wine stores. One of their wines has a very eye-catching label and it goes by the name of Goats do Roam, a light-hearted poke at a similar-sounding French wine region. The actual goats that inspired the label may be the ones in the front yard of the estate.

The author, observing Fairview's goat enclosure

The goat that may have inspired Fairview's "Goats do Roam"

In 1693, a tract of land on the southwestern slopes of Paarl Mountain was granted to Steven Verwey (thought to have been one of the French Huguenots who fled Protestant persecution in Europe from 1688) by Governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, a Dutch East India Company official instrumental in developing several of the Cape’s first and still finest wine ‘estates’. Just six years later, in 1699, the first wine was made on the farm. Today they have a fantastic facility on the estate with a huge wine tasting room that has large tables for busloads and a room at the back with smaller tables for groups like ours with two couples. The bonus at this place and the reason that it was easier to drink some wine at 10:30 in the morning was that Fairview also makes cheese and olive oil, so we could sample cheese that was paired to each of the 8 wines we tried and we cleansed our palate with chunks of French bread dipped in olive oil. The Browne’s bought some white wine that was to be shipped back to Virginia but we simply took the name of the distributer in Alberta for follow-up at a later date.

gardens at Fairview

Tasting Room at Fairview (Gym party in right background)

We ate lunch at the Delaire Graff Estate and then tasted some of their wines. The food was great, the service was outstanding and the estate itself was spectacular. The following description sounds like a boast but after experiencing the estate I might agree with what is said:

  “Situated on the highest crest of the magnificent Helshoogte Mountain Pass linking the Cape’s two leading wine districts - Stellenbosch and Franschhoek – the Delaire Graff Estate has one of the leading restaurants and boutique hotels in this illustrious vineyard region, if not in South Africa itself.”

I will let the pictures of the estate speak for themselves:

view from near Delaire Estate

Front Door of Delaire

Fountain at Delaire

Following lunch, we did a driving tour of the historic town of Stellenbosch. It is the second oldest European settlement in the province, after Cape Town. The town was founded in 1679 by the then Governor, Simon van der Stel, who named it after himself. The Stellenbosch University is situated there and during apartheid all programs were taught in Afrikaans and only whites were allowed.  Total non-whites make up a third of the student population and many courses are offered in English.

We then drove on to the Amani Estate but did not have time to stop there. I can now tell my buddy Mark Atkinson that we visited his family’s vineyard.

We returned to the Cape Grace Hotel and cleaned up before being picked up again by Alan at 6:30 PM. He took us to a really hip spot in the warehouse district for dinner and we ordered giant thin-crust pizzas that were cooked in a huge brick, igloo-shaped pizza oven in the middle of the former warehouse’s floor.

We retired early that night because we had to be up by 5 AM, so that Alan could get us to the airport and our British Airways flight to Johannesburg. From there we were to be picked up by Garth, another Micato guy who would get us to the Bateleur Charter hanger on the other side of this massive new airport for the transfer onto a bush plane and the flight to Londolozi Private Game Reserve. Wednesday would be a brutal travel day, especially for Mrs. Gym who does not do well on commercial jets, let alone bush planes. Stay tuned.