Day 28: Wining and Vining

Day 28
Today I'm in: Cape Town, South Africa

Today's tour of the Western Cape wine country started bright and early with a pickup at the hotel by the tour company.  Besides our South African guide, James, the rest of the group was all Americans - two sisters visiting from California, law students from Columbia and Harvard preparing to begin summer internships in Cape Town, and a recently-graduated registered nurse from Boston.

The majority of the wine-growing regions are north and east of Cape Town and are centered around the towns of Paarl, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek.  Wine production in the cape goes back to the 1600s, shortly after the first Dutch and French Huguenot settlers arrived, but South African wines didn't really rise to prominence until international sanctions were lifted after the fall of apartheid in 1994.  Today the wineries are big business and a huge tourist attraction as well - we passed several other tour buses as we headed toward the mountains on the N1 highway out of town.

We were fortunate to have incredible weather for yet another day.  The scenery in the wine region is pretty spectacular - steep mountains, rolling fields, and small towns, sort of like a Napa on steroids.  Similar to Napa and wine regions in Australia, each wine estate offers a tasting room, cellar tour, and restaurant, but some also have inns, cheesemaking facilities, banquet halls, hiking trails, even chocolate factories.  The grapes are picked in January and February, so most of the actual production is over by now.  That meant we wouldn't get to see any of the wine actually being made, but we did get to tour the production area at one estate and take a look at some of the machinery that's used to press and juice the grapes before sending them to the fermentation and aging rooms.  It was interesting to compare the wine-making process with the beer-brewing process that I learned all about last summer during my internship.

We stopped at five different wine estates and tasted close to 30 different wines.  I don't have the most refined palate when it comes to wine, but I did learn quite a bit more about how it's made and how to look for some of the more subtle flavors in each blend.  Mostly it was just great to be outside on a cloudless day with amazing views and interesting people to talk to. The last two estates were a bit of a blur, as by then we'd all had a fair amount of wine and were losing some of our connoisseur focus.  I think the final estate was glad to see us go.

For lunch I was able to try bobotjie, a South African dish that's made from curried minced beef that's layered in a dish with eggs and milk-soaked bread.  It's a blend of Malay and Boer (Dutch South African) influences and was pretty tasty, although I wasn't a big fan of the apricots and raisins that were mixed with the beef.

At the end of the tour we drove through the town of Stellenbosch, home to the country's largest Afrikaans-language university and one of the oldest settlements on the cape.  Afrikaans is definitely more of a presence on the cape than it was in Johannesburg (although there are plenty of Afrikaans speakers there, too)... it's not uncommon to see road signs, advertisements and banners in the language, and I've been hearing it spoken around me almost everywhere I go in Cape Town.  From what I have read, it's very close to Dutch, but the grammar and vocabulary are more simplified.  It's therefore easy for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans, but more difficult for Afrikaans speakers to pick up Dutch.  In any event, Stellenbosch looked like a really nice little town, although the university is not in session so it was very quiet.

On the way back to Cape Town, this time on the more southerly N2 highway, we passed the 'other side' of Cape Town - the apartheid-era townships on the Cape Flats, which are still home to more than half of the city's population.  I'll be visiting several of these townships on a tour tomorrow.