South Africa's Wine Country, Monday, May 2

Today was our day to explore the nearby wine county of South Africa.  Our driver, Allie, who is an Indian Muslim non-drinker of all things, arrived at 9:15 AM to collect us.  He is a chatty man, which is to be expected for someone who offers tours, and we told him what kind of winery experiences we liked.  We prefer smaller wineries that are less touristy and offer higher quality wines.

It was not a long drive to our first destination near the town of Stellenbosch, a wine farm (this seems to be the preferred term in South Africa) called Warwick.  It is a historic property that has been growing grapes for quite a while, but only began making its own wine recently.

A nice young man name Soko led us through the tasting, and he was extremely knowledgable.  We were seated outside overlooking the farm, very pleasant.  The wine here was very good.  The grape varietal that is most popular in South Africa is a hybrid that was also developed here called pinotage.  It is a hybrid of pinot noir and hermitage, which today is more commonly called cinsault.  One of the wines we especially liked was called a cape blend.  This term means that it is a blend of pinotage (could be anywhere from 30 to 70 percent) with any other red grape varietal.  Warwick also made an outstanding cabernet franc.  We ordered an assortment of six bottles to be shipped to us, which was not terribly expensive since they were not actually going to be shipped from South Africa, but rather fulfilled by their American distributor in California.

Our next stop is only five minutes away and is call Kanon Kop (means small cannon hill).  We enjoyed the lovely tasting room here and the adjacent art gallery featuring local artists.  One ceramicist has made some lovely bowls and we bought a piece.  The winemaker, Abrie, happened to be on site, and we had a nice chat with him.  Our server, Elistine, was also quite knowledgable.  The pinotage here is the star.  Their top pinotage is made from grapes harvested from 30 to 60 year old vines.  A second label, called Kadette, is made from the vines that are younger than 30 years.  This wine can also be ordered from a U. S. distributor, and we will be sure to do that when we get home.  We also were able to taste their top of the line wine called Paul Sauer, named for the owner.  It is fantastic, and when we later consulted our guide book, we discovered that it was the #1 recommended wine to sample!

We had time for one more winery before lunch, so we pulled into a more modern looking facility called Neil Ellis.  We were the only customers at this time, and the staff was very charming.  The main server told us she wanted to visit the U. S. in order to try a corn dog, which she thinks everyone on TV and in the movies is always eating!  We were also told the story of the French tourist who tasted every wine on the list (a total of 17), only to pronounce at the end, "I did not like any of them." We, on the other hand, liked two of the wines in particular:  the grenache and a syrah/grenache blend called Rodanos.  We bought a bottle of the Rodanos.

Lunch was over-the-top!  Our drivers had made reservations for us at a winery/restaurant called Delaire Graff, owned by the Graff family who apparently have diamond wealth.  We were seated on an outdoor patio with views of vineyards and spectacular mountains.  The views were so beautiful that they seemed unreal.  We started with soup and then Rob had chicken (breast and stuffed thighs) and I had fish called kinklip served on a sort of caper tartar sauce, which I quite enjoyed.  We enjoyed this with a sauvignon blanc/semillion blend white wine.  There is a tasting room here also, but we decided to pass and save our time to go somewhere else.

Someplace else was supposed to have been another small wine farm, but when we got there, they had closed early.  Today was some sort of bank holiday for celebrating May Day.  So we continued on to a larger, more commercial place called Spier.  The wine here was okay, but not as good as the previous places that we had visited.  We did appreciate the opportunity to stroll around the historic Dutch style estate/farm -- lovely buildings.

It was time to call it a day and return to Cape Town, but our driver wanted to take us on a village tour.  I assumed he meant that he was going to drive us through Stellenbosch, South Africa's second white settlement after Cape Town, but I was mistaken.  He meant to take us through Khayenitsha.  Khayenitsha is a township where native Africans were forced to resettle in the 1980's.  It looked like a horrible slum from our ride in the car.  He told us that 2 million people lived in the township, but a more accurate estimate is 400,000.  We saw an endless mass of shacks with corrugated iron construction, presumably with no heat or running water.  As bad as this seemed, my research has uncovered that half of the township's population actually do not live in a shack, but house.  This statistic is up from 1/3 of the population ten years ago.  So perhaps conditions are improving, but the ongoing influx of people for the eastern Cape area continues to impact overcrowding.  There must be a way to help these people have a decent quality of life, but I don't know what it is.  We had not expected to be brought to a place like this, and we can only assume our driver wanted to make a political point to us.  He seemed very upset that his government would allow people to live like this.

We returned to the hotel feeling a little down.  Dinner (since we had such a substantial lunch) was in the executive lounge once again.  It was hard to get motivated to go out and find a restaurant given that the concierge had told us it was not safe after dark.