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L’Avenir’s
resident grey heron surveys his domain
In
this week’s MENU:
L’Avenir Pinotage
Vertical Tasting L’Avenir Lodge Joostenberg Spring
menu Seductive
Sauvignons at The Vineyard Franschhoek
Uncorked Lunch at Foliage Jazz Brunch at
Winchester Mansions Plaisir de Merle
wine launch with lunch Elgin Pinot Noir
Tweet up Another little Rant
from Lynne on Copyright Victoria Sponge
Sandwich Cake Food and wine (and
a few other) events for you to enjoy Learn about wine
and cooking
To get the whole of our story, please
click on “READ ON.....” at the end of each paragraph, which will
lead you to the related blog, with pictures and more words. At the end of each
blog, click on RETURN
TO MENU to come back to the blog version of MENU.
This week’s Product menu Truffle season has been and gone, so any of you who want fresh truffles
need to wait till next season. However, we do have preserved black truffles,
white and black truffle oil and truffle salt and some other truffle related
products to enhance your dishes. See them here
L’Avenir
Pinotage Vertical Tasting To have
the opportunity to go back to 1996 and taste all the eight L’Avenir Pinotages which
have reached the top 10 in the ABSA Top 10 Pinotage competition over the last
few years was a very special opportunity. We were very fortunate to have
Mauritian-born former owner Marc Wiehe with us. He bought the farm in 1992. It
had been growing grapes for Nederburg in Paarl. Pharmacist Francois Naude, who
had more passion for making wine than for pushing pills, was hired as winemaker
and a legacy was born. By 2004, no Pinotage had been named in the top ten as
frequently in the annual Top Ten Pinotage Competition as L'Avenir, with seven
out of eight vintages in the Top Ten.
Marc Wiehe sold the farm in
2005 to French winemaker, Michel Laroche of Chablis. In 2010 Laroche merged
with the Jeanjean family and L'Avenir became part of the AdVini group, one of
the largest wine producers in France.
We started the tasting with the
1996, which still shows soft fruit, soft tannins and has the Pinot parent
peeping through, more than the Cinsaut. It still has some time to offer! It’s
an old style, but has lovely fruit. We then tasted through 1997, 1999, 2000,
2001, 2002, 2003 & 2011. All these Pinotages were made by Francois Naude,
who guided us through the tasting, with the exception of the 2011, which was
made by the current winemaker Dirk Coetzee. You can see the progression of
these wines as the vines aged and matured and the change in style as the years
went by and more was learned about how to treat this difficult grape, in the
vineyard, in the cellar and in the bottle. L’Avenir produces great Pinotage.
The tasting was held in their
tasting room and it was followed by supper on the terrace – thankfully with
lots of space heaters. The food had been catered by Bertus Basson’s staff and
was delicious. READ ON
L’Avenir Lodge L’Avenir had wanted us to stay at their
Lodge for a while and this was the perfect occasion to do so, as driving back
to Cape Town after such a tour de force of wine, which finished rather late,
was not an option. We were given one of the best rooms in the Lodge and had a
superbly comfortable stay. READ ON
Joostenberg
Spring menu After breakfast at L’Avenir’s
Lodge we did some cheese shopping at Parmalat’s Simonsberg cheese factory shop
in Stellenbosch and then drove through to Joostenberg, where Susan and Chef
Christophe Dehosse had invited us to join them for lunch to try out their new
menu in their recently refurbished restaurant. It was lovely to discover that
Hartenberg cellarmaster Carl Schultz and his wife Karen had also been invited,
as well as co-owner/winemaker Tyrrel Myburgh’s wife Anette. Tyrell was in the
USA, marketing their wines. We had a very gemütlich lunch with lovely food,
good wine and wonderful company – all the ingredients of a wonderful meal. READ ON
Seductive
Sauvignons at The Vineyard Then it was
a quick trip home to unpack the car, fetch a friend from Europe who was staying
at the Winchester Mansions and tohare off to The Vineyard Hotel for Wine
Concepts’ Seductive Sauvignon wine show. Were we tired? Hell no, when faced
with over 107 wines to taste. Many farms showed both Sauvignon Blanc and
Cabernet Sauvignon. And there were many seriously good wines to sample READ ON
Franschhoek
Uncorked On Saturday, we took our friend Terry to
this Franschhoek festival. We collected our tickets and glasses from
Babylonstoren which gave us a chance to show him their amazing gardens.
Unknowingly, we arrived at the perfect weekend to see their collection of over
5000 clivias in full bloom. It was a superb site. You can walk through the
clivia wood and admire those planted plus a good display of other unusual and
beautiful hybrids in pots. Then it was off into Franschhoek in time for our
lunch booking at Foliage. After lunch we called in at Haute Cabrière, who had
such a fun event going on in their marquee. We tasted their wine and bubbly,
had a bit of a bop to the band and threw some balls at a rubber ring in the
lake to try to win a bottle of Ratafia. No, we didn’t get one. What a lovely
way to spend a Saturday. READ ON
Lunch at Foliage Foliage Restaurant was opened recently by
talented Chef Chris Erasmus, formerly at La Motte. As he puts it, the cuisine
is “From farm and forest to the plate.” We have wanted to try it out since he
opened, so the festival seemed the perfect occasion to book. We had two courses
each and loved the food and the house wine choices. READ ON
Jazz Brunch at
Winchester Mansions This has become an
institution at the Winchester. Once a month in the off season, more frequently
in the summer, you arrive a 11 and stay till 2 and in the process listen to
jazz, eat breakfast, morning tea, sushi, and finish with a full Sunday lunch and dessert. And all for a very
reasonable charge of R350 per person. They provide a glass of Miss Molly Bubbly
to start the morning and the Sunday Papers READ ON
Plaisir de Merle
wine launch with lunch Plaisir de
Merle invited us to join them at the launch of their new Petit Plaisir red, a
Shiraz-driven blend with lunch at The Dining Room
in Woodstock, owned by the talented Karin Dudley. Petit Plaisir means small pleasure,
but this is anything but small. It is a lovely, sweet and soft blend of Shiraz,
Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and a scant 0.7% Viognier, which
shows its presence despite the small amount. It is easy to quaff and great with
food. We suspect we will be seeing this on wine lists all over the country
soon. READ ON
Elgin Pinot Noir
Tweet up This “Tweet Up” was held at Cork
and Chalk Pizza place in Kloof Street and we tasted and
tweeted our opinions of 12 Elgin Pinot Noirs, while in Elgin the farms’
winemakers met to do their own tasting, tweeting and watching the tweets we
were sending. All the tweets from both venues are projected onto screens in
each venue. It is a good way for the producers to get an idea of what people
think of their wines. And there were some really impressive Pinot Noirs on
show. Our high scorers of the twelve wines tasted were from Catherine Marshall,
Elgin Vintners, Iona, Lothian, Oak Valley, Paul Cluver, Paul Wallace and
Shannon.
Another little
Rant from Lynne on Copyright Since my
last rant the results have been encouraging. John has had some good orders for
his photographs from professional organisations. We say “Thank You”. BUT why do
some people think that using someone else’s image on social media doesn’t
require payment or permission? You are getting worldwide coverage using someone
else’s labour, which doesn’t come for free. And you have to pay for that. If
you can’t take a usable photograph yourself, realise you are paying for expertise.
If you can’t fix your car, you need a mechanic. The same logic applies. Don’t
steal images; the copyright does not belong to you. And its use without
permission is a crime, which is enforceable by law.
This week’s
recipe
was requested by a friend in the media who, like Lynne, has been devoted to the
BBC Programme Great British Bake Off, which finished this week and will be
sadly missed. She wanted a good recipe for a classic Victoria Sponge. It is a
long time since Lynne made one, but this recipe from The Constance Spry Cookery
Book is simple and has sensible instructions, geared to easily measurable
proportions.
Victoria
Sponge Sandwich Cake
Ingredients: 3 eggs. Their weight in each
of butter, castor sugar and self raising flour (or 1.5 teaspoons of baking
powder and plain flour). Raspberry or strawberry jam. Icing or caster sugar for
dusting the top. Whipped cream is an option.
Set your oven to 180°C. Cream
the butter until it looks like whipped cream. Add the sugar and beat until
white. Add the eggs, one at a time, with a good spoonful of sifted flour. Beat
thoroughly. Sift the baking powder with the remaining flour, stir quickly into
the mixture. Turn into two tins, 7 inches across (17 or 18 cm will work) that
have been well buttered and floured. Bake in a moderate oven 180°C for 20 to 30
minutes. Turn out onto a rack. When cool, sandwich well with a good jam. Powder
with icing sugar or castor sugar. You could also add some whipped cream on top
of the jam.
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 type of event 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 list of wine and food
pairing dinners, list
of Special events with wine and/or food connections,
list of Wine Shows and Tastings and list of special dinner events.
All the events are listed in date order and we have a large number of exciting
events to entertain you right through the year. Events outside the Western Cape are listed here.
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. Karen Glanfield has taken
over the UnWined
wine appreciation courses from Cathy. See the details here
The Hurst Campus, an accredited school for people who want to become
professional chefs, has a variety of courses. See the details here
Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.
In addition to the
new Sense
of Taste Culinary Arts School, Chef Peter Ayub runs a
four module course for keen home cooks at his Maitland complex. Details
here
Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has French cooking classes in Noordhoek
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.
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 Thursday evenings and she has decided to
introduce LCHF (Banting classes). The Kitchen Confidence classes, which focus
on essential cooking skills and methods, have been expanded and are now taught
over 2 evenings. She continues to host private dining and culinary team
building events at her home. She trained with Raymond Blanc, and has been a
professional chef for 25 years. More info
here
2nd October 2014
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 online shop 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 and standard 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
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