Wyn and Wors

A good title will help sell most things.  Alliteration adds activity and action.  So if you are going to have an event with Shiraz, what would you do to spice it up?  How to pick up on the peppery notes so characteristic of the varietal?  What is spicy without being overwhelming?  Salami!  Or it can be.  So Shiraz and Salami.  That’s a catchy title, if a little too specific.  How many salami producers are there in the Cape?  Shiraz and sausages.  That is what I would have called it, but the organisers clearly thought that boerewors will be associated with the event.  The quality of wors in this part of the world is below par, so maybe that decided it.  They went for the upmarket Shiraz and Charcuterie.  How do you say that?   Sharkooturee apparently.  When given a choice I prefer not to pronounce words of French origin, because getting it right seems pretentious and getting it wrong makes you seem uneducated.  Except buffet.  I pronounce it as in Warren.  Always. 

So we went to the “Feast of Shiraz and charcuterie” at Hartenberg.  Where the focus was Shiraz and cold meats.  Having some time before the start, we visited a few wine farms. I find it nearly impossible to drive past Villiera and why would you?  The wine is so good and priced so well.  Tasted all the bubbles, stocked up on the dinky bottles, and tasted some Gewürztraminer and Riesling which also took a ride back to the stock room.  We tasted Port and noble late harvest, with the port going home for a very short stay with the navigator.  Since my last visit with thecyclists, the tasting room changed.  It is more open, modern, professional and less intimate.  Service remains as good as ever.  They don’t rush you through the range and, unusual in Stellenbosch and usual for them, they don’t charge for tasting despite the vast quantities of students that must drink there.

Lured by a MCC tasted at the overcrowded Stellenbosch wine festival last year we went to Mooiplaas. Up into the hills past Kaapzicht on a gravel road you find yourself in real farm country.  The beaten track lies somewhere off in the distance.  The tasting room is in an atmospheric converted stable.  Some of the original walls are visible and the wine served on the troughs.  The troughs are now glass covered, which would have annoyed the horses.

Service was very friendly even if she had some interesting thoughts on the continent Pinotage hails from.  The entire range is not for tasting, including the bubbles, so it was bought on memory.  One interesting aspect was the influence tasting the difference of wines poured with an aerator.  They make a “chocolate” Merlot and coffee Pinotage.  I couldn’t taste the chocolate at all, but the aerator made the coffee flavours more pronounced than without it.  An untasted Chenin joined the bubbles for the trip home.    

And so the main event.  In the cellar at Hartenberg there was a small stand on a barrel every 3 meters.  Some sold meat products, some cheese a bread with filling stand, but mostly wine.  Normally just one wine per stand, but these were heavy hitters of the Shiraz world. To name a few: Boekenhoutskloof, Thelema, with winemaker Rudi Schultz’s own, Rust en Vrede as well as Cirrus, Luddite (with sausages) and Mullineux (bought earlier in the year).  New to me was Kleinood from Tamboerskloof and wine from Boschkloof. Others took some pictures here and here. In general, the best Shiraz in the country all in one place.

At Moreson’s bread and wine a very enthousiastic Niel Jewell , sliced thin samplers, taught a lot about cured meats and sausages.  As an aside I saw how much a bottle of bubbles from Mr Bubbles (Peter Ferreira) was worth in sausage.  It is a lot!  And the sausage is very good.  Had good chat with the gentle genius Nico van der Merwe, he of his own name and Saxenburg.  A very likeable man, just like his brother at Major’s Hill.  In the end the only wines I bought was his own label 2006 and Saxenburg 2007.  He described the Saxenburg wines as lunch and his own as dinner.  With lunch being lighter and easier drinking than dinner.

Soon the noise masquerading as music got too much and we set the compass for Stellenbosch central.  After a few abortive attempts at locating De Oude Bank whilst in the car we took to Stellenbosch by foot.  Much easier on my nerves.  Clearly this town pre-dates motor cars and from their behaviour so does some of the pedestrians.   We eventually found the bakery.  Very apologetically they told us most of the bread was sold out.  We decided on drinks only and then the food of others enticed us to order a platter of remaining breads, cheeses and pestos.  All produced on site or sourced from small producers.  I had InneSense lemonade for the very first time. It is good, but not as nice as Frankie’s. Although very tempted by Eric van Heerden’s Triggerfish on draught, self control won the day.  Any place with Triggerfish on tap, deserves another visit.  So I will be back here, and maybe for the Shiraz as well.