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Wednesday, March 05, 2014

The RMB Starlight Concert at Vergelegen

A ride from our car to the Vergelegen manor House was most welcome!

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Muratie Harvest Festival

Some of our wine farms radiate the expense of money and sophistication and lots of bling. At others you can see reality, the long history and tradition marked on all their walls, echoed in their wines and carried on by their owners and staff. Muratie is one of the latter and we love her for it. So missing her Harvest Festival each year is not an option. This took place on the farm last weekend and we had a ball. Read on here and see the photos

First we were welcomed by glasses of their Lady Alice MCC

Then it was time to have a vertical tasting of three of their wines in the large cellar room

Owner Rijk Melck tells us about the plans for the farm since the very, very sad and sudden death of their young winemaker Francois Conradie this year. Francois Haasbroek is assisting them in the harvest and all the staff on the farm are putting their shoulders to the wheel and helping where they can this busy year, as the grapes look fantastic and need to be made into great wine

Then he told us some of the interesting history of the farm in relation to the wine labels and names

We had a vertical tasting of three Muratie wines: Isabella Chardonnay, Ansela van de Caab red blend and the Ronnie Melck Shiraz. These wines are growing in stature all the time and you can see how well they mature when you taste the older wines, whites as well as red

Some happy festival attendees stomping some grapes

Little girls having fun in the sticky mess of grapes and juice

The festival crowd enjoying Muratie wines and lunch under umbrellas and oaks listening to good music and just having a lot of fun

Young and old

Mike Bampfield Duggan

Monika Elias of the South African Wine Tourism Handbook

Our lunch was a whopping beef burger and chips and some killer chilli poppers washed down with Muratie's excellent Rose and their Pinotage

Owner Rijk Melck, also enjoying his Rose

The rock band that entertained us late afternoon

Sad horn

Lively horn

Good barbecue chicken wings

Michelle Stewart and Renee Bampfield Duggan having fun

The most wonderful bunch of healthy grapes we have seen yet this harvest, right in the car park!

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The Vineyard Hotel's historic, second Harvest

Everyone knows that journalists stay up late partying and don’t do early mornings. Not true. Once again this summer we were up and at the Vineyard Hotel by 7am to take part in the historic second harvest of the grapes from their small vineyard in the gardens on the side of the Liesbeek river.

Welcomed by a great glass of bubbly and some orange juice to take the motes from our eyes

We marvelled at the amount of good healthy and ripe grapes this year. Obviously affected by the long wet winter and the nice warm summer days we have been having. The grapes had to be netted to prevent the birds from decimating the crop

Last year we had precisely one bunch of grapes on our vine, this year there were at least 20

Mike Bampfield Duggan of Wine Concepts with his vine

General Manager of the Hotel Roy Davies and Food and Beverage Manager Matt Dietchmann were there to shepherd us through the picking

Brian Cluver from Warwick helps Mike remove the nets so we can all get picking and in the background Norma Ratcliffe and Lynne remove the clips that tie the netting down

Norma Ratcliffe, who will be making the wine this year for the Vineyard, begins the picking; it's backbreaking work, but we didn’t exactly have acres of vines to work on.

Lynne gets down to picking our grapes as well as the rest of the row.

Healthy ripe and sweet Sauvignon Blanc grapes picked from the front rows. At the back of the vineyard there are three rows of Semillon

Norma with the lug boxes full of grapes going off to the press at Warwick

The hotel garden staff help to take the heavy lug boxes to the van, supervised by Warwick’s viticulturist Ronald Spies

Then we were rewarded with a lovely breakfast spread in the restaurant

Lynne and Kitty Petousis, owner of the Vineyard Hotel, trying to make healthy but hungry choices

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