Eating the wine route

In training for the Stellenbosch Wine Festival this month, Nancy Richards does a whistle-stop tour of the new dining spots in the vineyards.

’Glass of bubbles?’’ It’s 10.20am and we’re early for our gourmet tour of Stellenbosch, starting at the recently revamped house of mousse, JC le Roux.

“Or perhaps a quick look around first?”

As effervescent as the product, Rozanne Hackart guides us through the tasting room and aerial restaurant and into the lightly chilled processing chamber, where racks of tilted bottles are mid remuage, the twist-and- turn process that settles the sediment in the neck.

“This is the bit that gets frozen, the ice plug is then popped out, the bottle topped up, capped, foiled et voil€! One visitor wanted to know if he could buy the ice plugs to use as lollipops!”

It’s all irresistibly fizzy at JC — fresh, white, blond and light with a bubble motif sandblasted on the glass, with plush pink the accent colour.

We feel the first frisson of a 2004 pinot noir in the silver-white Oyster Bar, followed by a peach-bloom rosé (98% pinot noir, 2% cab merlot) to wash down the platter of shucked, iced molluscs.

But the experience isn’t over till the scintilla sings — the royalty of the range has a dedicated tasting room in green-and-black velvet, where Hackart outlines the plans for sweet and sparkling pairings of their wines with nougat, rose water Turkish delight, fudge and caramel cashews.

On December 24 last year, the winery was struck by lightning. One can only imagine that Bacchus must have been feeling impatient — or jealous.

But not as jealous as he might have been at Dornier, where Zeus himself is immortalised on the wine label, metamorphosing into a twin-headed swan to attract the lovely Lira.

But let me not get ahead of myself. The drive to Bodega (ex La Masseria) on the Dornier estate was an opportunity to let the bubbles settle and find out about our guide, Stellenbosch Wine Route’s CEO and festival organiser Annareth Jacobs, whose wedding plans at this stage are eclipsed by the forthcoming Wine Festival.

Conversation is arrested as, from the homestead’s wide verandah, we take in the magnificent view of the undulated wine cellar and waterfall tumbling down the Helderberg.

Like the wines, stories flow thick and fast here. Swiss owner Christoph Dornier’s father was a well-known aeroplane designer back in the day, and the Zeus/swan logo derives from a painting by Christoph of his son Raphael, who oversees the estate and the restaurant, where the kikoi and Kente- cloth décor make it as colourful as a packet of jelly beans.

The “entry-level” chenin, Cocoa Hill 2008, comes with another story about one-time resident Long Ben the pirate, but gets interrupted by the arrival of a gorgeously, thick and creamy mushroom-and-broccoli soup, matched with another, more wooded chenin.

Twin glasses, splashes of pinotage on the right, merlot on the left, come together with starter rows of vertical prawn and roasted- vegetable spring-rolls; aubergine- wrapped pepper and goat’s cheese with pesto-and-wild-rocket topping; butternut strips with a red onion fan and feta.

Louine du Toit, restaurant and wine-lounge manager, whose years in the trade have given her an impressive savoir, talks us through the Christmas-cake flavours of a 2004 Donatus flagship blend and suggests that a bottle of palette- warming pinotage should be taken neat with no food, and that a good merlot needs lamb.

Next time, she recommends we try their speciality flammenkuchen — a wafer-thin pastry base topped with crème fraîche and anything else that takes your fancy.

Chef Naas Pienaar, whose own kitchen creds could paper a dining- hall wall, emerges beaming to see how we enjoyed it, and we leave just as a small but merry party starts a wine-tasting around the fireplace.

The road to Rust en Vrede, where we are to have a main, passes hydro- ponic tunnels filled with strawberries, a mushroom plantation, the organic farmers’ market and rows of elegantly skeletal trees.

It’s hard not to be distracted by the gentleness of grey-green Stellenbosch in winter, but we focus once again at the award-winning estate — Springbok -legend Jannie Engelbrecht territory — where there’s a reverend hush of history around gables and aged oaks.

Even more so in the low-lit cellar, where, surrounded by archways filled with thousands of bottles of resting wine, we sit at an intimate table to have our l unch of courgette-and-tomato pasta topped with a grilled chicken-breast.

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Roggeland Country House