Saturday, August 17, 2019

This Week’s MENU. Top 10 Pinotage, Kanonkop & Constantia Glen tastings, Elgin Winter Festival, Stew Recipe, Wine of the Week

 Flying off, West Coast cormorants
A Sea Point Sunset
A scramble, that’s our life right now. Many stories to tell and final preparations for boarding an Emirates flight at midday tomorrow. And so another MENU adventure begins. This time we will start in Edinburgh, with the Tattoo being a hugely anticipated treat. Then up to Banff and Rothes at the start of Speyside. Across Scotland and down through the Midlands to Devon and Cornwall before we end our journey in London and some South African owned vineyards in Sussex. We will publish a travelogue on Menu after our return giving comprehensive stories, as we have done after our previous journeys. In the mean time, we will constantly publish snippets in Instagram and Facebook, so please follow our progress there. We plan to do a lot of interesting things in interesting places. Watch as we go and join us on the journey, if only vicariously…

 A huge thank you to all our generous readers who have paid a voluntary subscription to MENU into our Paypal account. It works well for readers outside South Africa, but is not great for those of you who would like to pay in Rand. So we have opened a local PayFast account which works in Rand. Thanks are due to all of you who wrote to ask for an alternative payment vehicle. 
We were invited to Meerendal for the ABSA Top 10 Pinotage Finalists Blind Tasting event. Our task was to review 20 wines that the selection panel had judged to the best Pinotages of the year. We were to taste and decide which wines we thought should be on this year’s Top 10 Pinotage list. These wines would then be judged for the awards by the judging panel…
The Top 10 Pinotage Awards lunch was held in the recently inaugurated Olive Press venue at Boschendal last week. Canapés were served on the stoep where all the 20 best rated wines were on the tables for tasting and the winemakers, who were distinguished by white Panama hats, were there to discuss them…
An invitation to taste a range of current and vintage wines at Kanonkop was rapidly accepted. A rare occurrence; we so enjoyed our last tasting there and we were eager to repeat the experience. This was to be followed by a light lunch and that is always a special tradition at Kanonkop…
Our wine club meeting this month was at Constantia Glen with winemaker Justin van Wyk. Welcomed with a glass of RoseMarie and Funa MCC, we began at 6 pm in the Conservatory and it was still light…
We were off to the Elgin Railway Market last Friday night to help them celebrate Winter Wine and Words at the Elgin Market. We are only sorry that we could not stay longer to enjoy the rest of the weekend, but work called. We got there at 6 just as things were beginning…
Nicky and Paul Wallace very kindly put us up in one of their beautiful cottages on Wallovale in Elgin for the night after the Winter Wine Festival on Friday. Icy cold outside, warm and comfortable inside. We were given a warm welcome by Benjie the spaniel…
An invitation to attend the guided tasting of some of this year’s Cape Winemakers Guild Auction wines is something we covet each year and are happy to accept. We managed to time our holiday around this. Held in the ballroom at the Westin Grand Hotel it is always well attended...
While Winter prepares to give way to Spring, it always puts up a struggle and we have been blessed with some real Cape wet winter weather – perfect weather for a rich stew. This one has an interesting addition which gives a little added piquancy…
At a tasting at Constantia Glen we tasted winemaker Justin's van Wyk’s own 2018 Syrah from his Van Wyk Family Wines and were so impressed. The grapes come from cool Elgin and have produced a rich Syrah, with beautiful fruit, elegance, power and incense wood on the nose. On the palate, cherry, berry fruit with depth and purity. Soft and juicy, it then shows some umami flavours, with a hint of white river stone minerality on the end; so interesting, so enjoyable. R260



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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 our website and ancillary works are © John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus. Our restaurant reviews are often 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 apologise.

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