Official Cheese Taster

Today we are up early and ready by 9am to be picked up for our all day wine tour…that’s right, an all day wine tour, the African Story Wine Tour to be exact. Our guide Este, was charged with driving a carload full of people, two ladies from Sweden, two ladies from Germany, two ladies from Brazil, the only other guy from South Africa (but living in Ireland) an Irish lady, one girl from Holland and Ulises and I. We hopped into a cargo van and drove through the picturesque Hottentot mountains towards the wine route vineyards. We started at Villeria winery, taking a brief tour through their vat rooms, stemming and crushing rooms, and finally arriving in the tasting room. There is something ridiculously decadent about sampling wines at 10AM on an empty stomach. We started off tasting rose champagne (called Cap Cassis), regular champagne, merlot, cabernet, and finally a really yummy dessert wine. We then hopped back into the van and made our way to the second vineyard.

We arrived at Beyerskloof where we had our lunch stop and another tasting of 5 new wines, the wine that this vineyard is known for is called Pinotage (apparently a blend of pinot noir and some other grape variety only found here in S. Africa ), and is a super dark sharp tasting dry wine. We ate as much yummy food and bread as we could as we still had a long day of drinking ahead of us…and it had started to rain, just the tiniest bit.

The wine route area was beautiful, green rolling hills surrounded with higher peaks on nearly all sides, lined with farmlands and vineyards stretching as far as the eye can see. It was odd to se the vines barren of fruit as it is winter here and all of the vineyards are in the down season, well past harvest – having just come from Europe I’ve got to get used to the fact that it is winter here. I will say that this area is the antithesis of what your average American probably thinks of when thinking of the African continent.

We arrived at our next vineyard, Backsberg, to continue the tasting fun and round it all up with a bit of brandy and Belgium chocolate tasting. We lucked out by having Darwin as our Brandy tasting instructor. He began by getting all of us to agree that our dignity would be left at the door and we must not drink the Brandy until he told us it was okay.

According to our instructor, here are the steps:
1-Cup the brandy in your hand, stem through your middle fingers, and resting against the outside edge of your thumb to warm it
2- Wet your thumb with a bit of the brandy and sniff it
3 – To sniff, wave your head/nose above the glass of brandy and breathe in short wafting motion
4 – Sip a bit and chew it in your mouth and swallow
5 – Then bring air into your mouth like you are kissing a fish

We all looked like jerks, but it definitely broke down the walls (well that and the 14 or so samples of wine we’d had). We rushed off to get our sampling of Belgian Dark and Milk chocolates and then piled into the van to go to our last stop and our cheese tasting…that’s right! Cheese….

We stopped at our last winery, Fairview, and got to enjoy our last 6 samples of South African wine, with such awesome names as Goats do Roam and Bored Doe, and some of the most wonderful goat and cow cheese that I have had so far on this trip (or maybe I was just experiencing a serious queso deficiency). We ate cheese until the winery closed down and then headed outside to see some the goats for the farm – check out the photos.

We rounded up the day by eating all you can eat Mexican buffet food (edible, but not good) and I got this wonderful photo of Ulises in one of the plentiful sombreros lying around….it is totally his look don’t you think?

Tomorrow we are off to a very different tour, the cultural tour.