Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
Eat
In Guide’s Five time Outstanding Outlet Award Winner
+27
21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
In this
week’s MENU:
Flying
from Cape Town to Bordeaux
Chérac
and Cognac
Ile
d’Oléron
La
Rochelle
Bordeaux, here we come This week’s MENU has a different format. Nominally, we are on holiday,
but some of our activities are worthy of communicating to you. Most of it is
links to blogs, where we will let the pictures tell the story. Click on the
links to see it or just catch them at www.adamastorbacchus.blogspot.com
or follow us on Twitter, @mainingmenu
On Sunday night, we flew out of Cape Town to
Bordeaux via a short stopover at Schipol airport, Amsterdam. It was very
tiring, the seats were very uncomfortable in the Boeing, better in the smaller
second-leg plane. We picked up our hire car, a diesel Renault Kangoo estate.
Highly recommended, it is in the cheapest category - it’s an up-specced van - and
has loads of space and all the mod cons we need: a TomTom (invaluable for finding
new places) cruise control, air conditioning, very comfortable seats and it’s
amazingly quiet and very economical. Diesel here is cheaper than petrol at
about €1.27 a litre. We’ve just had to get used to using a clutch again. We had
a two hour drive through lovely green countryside with roses everywhere and
arrived at about 7.30 at our first B&B, 2 Route du Puits
des Brousses in Cherac with hosts Claudy and Alain Caillaud,
between the towns of Saintes and Cognac. After supper in a local restaurant, we
retired to a much needed bed after being up for more than 37 hours as neither
of us could do more than doze on the plane. See more here.
Cognac Next day,
we drove down the road to a small local producer of Cognac and Pineau des
Charentes, a sweet fortified wine. After a tasting, we drove through to Cognac,
where we visited a couple of markets. The quality of the produce is so much
better than anything we see. Everything is fresh and immaculately presented. More here. Then the highlight of
our day, a visit to
Cognac producer H.Mounier, where we were privileged to taste
some very old and special cognacs from the barrel. They have three websites: www.hmounier.fr www.polignac.fr www.reynac.fr
. Then via a brief look at Remy Martin, back to Cherac for an al fresco supper
of things we bought in the markets.
Saintes is a very pretty town on the River Charente.
We visited a very innovative small negociant who buys cognacs of different ages
from small producers, bottles and markets them. Guilhem Grosperrin took over his father’s
business ten years ago, when he was 23. His father had
multiple sclerosis and the business was failing. He is very entrepreneurial and
has revived and grown the business. We tasted some superb single vineyard,
varietal and very old cognacs. More here.
After this visit, we drove west to the Ile D’Oleron, a
largish island linked by a causeway to the mainland where we planned to have a
real holiday. More here.
Next day, we explored more of the island and you can see what we saw here.
Yesterday, we drove to La Rochelle, an ancient town
about an hour to the north, which John visited in 1971. We knew that prices in
the restaurants round the harbour would be scary – they were – so Lynne made
baguette sandwiches for us, which we enjoyed with a beer on the harbour’s edge.
After a few hours’ walking round La Rochelle, we returned for a long walk on
the beach on the Atlantic side of the island. Pictures here.
Internet access has been sporadic in Oléron and, both
here and in Cherac, we have been able to receive emails, but have had
difficulty in sending them, so we apologise for any lack of response.
Tomorrow we head back to Bordeaux, quite early, to be
at the start of Vinexpo, which lasts five days.
This week’s recipe has taken a couple
of weeks’ break, but we are picking up ideas.
There is a huge and rapidly growing
variety of interesting things to occupy your leisure time here in the Western
Cape. There
are so many interesting things to do in our world of food and wine that we have
made separate list for each month for which we have information. To see what’s happening in our world of
food and wine (and a few other cultural events), visit
our Events Calendar.
All the events are listed in date order and we already have a large number of
exciting events to entertain you right through the year. It will be updated
when we return.
Learn about wine and cooking
We receive a lot of enquiries from people who want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run wine
education courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see
details of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here and here and the CWA courses here.
Chez
Gourmet in Claremont has a
programme of cooking classes. We plan to visit their French establishment after
Vinexpo. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.
Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs evening cooking classes at Sense of Taste, his
catering company in Maitland. We can recommend them very highly, having enjoyed
his seafood course. Check
his programme here. Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has cooking
classes in Fish Hoek and conducts cooking tours to Normandy. You can see more details here. Emma
Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca cooking courses at her
home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir Crazy courses are now being
run from Dish Food and Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite
Groote Schuur hospital). Lynn Angel runs the Kitchen Angel
cooking school and does private dinners at her home. She holds hands-on
cooking classes for small groups on Monday and Wednesday evenings. She trained
with Raymond Blanc, and has been a professional chef for 25 years. More info
here
15th June 2013
Remember - if you can’t find something, we’ll do our best to get it for you, and, if you’re in Cape Town or elsewhere in the country, we can send it to you! Check our product list for details and prices.
PS If a word or name is in bold type and underlined,
click on it for more information
Phones:
+27 21 439 3169 / 083 229 1172 / 083 656 4169
Postal
address: 60 Arthurs Rd, Sea Point 8005
Our Adamastor
& Bacchus© tailor-made Wine, Food and Photo tours take small groups (up to 6) to
specialist wine producers who make the best of South Africa’s wines. Have fun
while you learn more about wine and how it is made! Tours can be conducted in
English, German, Norwegian or Dutch flavoured Afrikaans.
Recommendations of products and outside events are not
solicited or charged for, and are made at the
authors’ pleasure. All
photographs, recipes and text used in these newsletters and our blogs are © John & Lynne Ford,
Adamastor & Bacchus. Our restaurant reviews are usually unsolicited. We
prefer to pay for our meals and not be paid in any way by anyone. Whether we
are invited or go independently, we don’t feel bad if we say we didn’t like it.
Honesty is indeed our best policy. While every effort is made to avoid
mistakes, we are human and they do creep in occasionally, for which we
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