Last Wednesday saw us visiting Buitenverwachting in
Constantia with our wine club. It is one of our favourite farms, producing
superb wine. It has a very good restaurant run by chef Edgar Osojnik, a
successful coffee & deli shop, a family of owls in the oaks and the new
tasting room ....
... which is in the
old cellar on the side of the large lawn
Previous Cellarmaster Hermann
Kirschbaum, who has been with Buitenverwachting since 1993, has been promoted to
Farm Manager. Wine maker (for the last 13 years) Brad Paton has now taken over
as Cellarmaster. He will be appointing a new winemaker shortly. Here is Herman
with his wife Adrienne who organised the platters we enjoyed after the tasting
Inside the spacious new tasting
room, we made ourselves comfortable on the long sofas
Modernity fits well into the
old building's core
There are lots of different
seating options
We began with the
Buitenverwachting MCC Brut, often sold out, bright and crisp with some pinot
raspberry showing. A great way to start the evening with experienced winemaker
Hermann
Baby vines above the bar. We began
with the whites and tasted Buiten Blanc. This amazingly popular wine sells over
600,000 bottles a year and is on most wine lists in South Africa. Tasting it, you can understand why and it sells for only R60 a bottle on the farm. One of our favourites,
the Hussey’s Vlei Sauvignon blanc, is clean, crisp and lively, with good green Constantia
flavours. The well wooded 2014 Maximus Blanc Fumé
is complex and elegant, well integrated with the vanilla wood and built to last. R250 a bottle. We are so glad to see a revival in wooded Sauvignon Blancs, it
does add so much finesse and character to these lovely wines
The Oenophiles, earnestly
tasting, scoring and making notes. Buitenverwachting is keen to host wine
clubs
A line up of some of the wines
we tasted. We had four reds, starting with the Meifort, a Bordeaux blend, which
always sold extremely well in our shop. It is made from the same barrels of
wine that the flagship wine Christine is selected from and therefore gives very
good value for money at R90 a bottle on the farm. The Christine is in a class
all of its own however, showing such intensity with expensive wood and herbs on
the nose, soft, supple and warm; a lovely cassis blockbuster, R350 on the farm. We
loved the Malbec with its savoury beetroot and pomegranate wildness, soft and
supple and sappig with cherry sweetie and soy flavours, gentle tannins and a
vanilla ending. R250 on the farm. The Merlot is full of rich dark cherries, tobacco dust, some mint and long after tastes, R160
Adrienne had organised platters for us for afterwards. Good bread, some cheese and curried meatballs, two dips,
olives feta and sundried tomatoes, biltong, spicy chorizo and some grapes. What
a great evening, thank you Herman and Adrienne, we had great wine and food and
great fun with you both
© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment