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Thursday, August 14, 2014

Wellington Quest for the Best 2014 at Au' de Hex Boutique Hotel, Wellington

David Sonnenberg told us that Wellington is much closer to Cape Town than Franschhoek and that it is a gem of a wine valley. This was at this award ceremony, held in a fairly new venue, Au' de Hex Boutique Hotel in Wellington, where Johan van Schalkwyk, (chef owner of Twist Some More) produced a really good menu to match the winning wines

What is Quest for the Best? “Quest for the Best” is a competition initiated for Wellington by Wellington, celebrating the wine district’s quest to showcase the overall quality and diversity of the Wine of Origin Wellington

Judging: A total of 64 wines were sampled and judged at a blind-tasting session by five esteemed Sommelier-judges on 21 July

These judges were:

Gregory Mutambe – Head Sommelier Twelve Apostles Hotel

Barry Scholfield - Sommelier, Rust & Vrede Restaurant

Kent Scheermeyer - Hospitality Consultant

David Clarke - Previous Chairman Australian Sommelier Association, Ex Animo Wine Logistics

Higgo Jacobs - Sommelier & Wine industry Consultant

The ‘Quest for the Best’ top 10 wines of Wellington for 2014 are:

· Diemersfontein Wines 2012 Carpe Diem Viognier Reserve

· Diemersfontein Wines 2012 Carpe Diem Pinotage Reserve

· Doolhof Wine Estate (Pty) Ltd 2009 Doolhof Theseus

· Welbedacht Wine Estate 2005 Welbedacht Cricket Pitch

· Welbedacht Wine Estate 2011 Welbedacht Wine Estate Pinotage

· Thokozani CCV 2012

· Wellington Wines 2014 Bovlei Cellar Chenin Blanc

· Wellington Wines 2011 La Cave Cabernet Sauvignon

· Dunstone 2012 Dunstone Shiraz

· Linton Park Wines 2013 Louis Fourie Chardonnay

Students from the Hurst Academy prepare for the onslaught of guests

It’s a spacious and well designed function venue

Seating outside for better weather

The entrance

And a warm welcome with good, representative, but anonymous, wines to try

Journalist Johan Crafford with a colleague

The service bar

Very professional staff

Chef of the day and owner of Twist restaurant, Johan van Schalkwyk

He prepared some lovely canapés. These are choux pastry buns stuffed with smoked salmon paté and caramelised onions

Wonton cups with smoked ham on apple jelly mousse

Pickled Yellowtail topped with pineapple

Today’s menu

Schalk Burger Senior of Welbedacht with his wife and David Sonnenberg of Diemersfontein, who was our Master of Ceremonies for the awards

The gathered assembly

David Sonnenberg about to announce the awards

David with judge Higgo Jacobs – convenor of the completion judges, member of the Sommelier society & Wine industry Consultant,

Higgo tells us about the wines they tasted and judged

An award for Diemersfontein

Johan Fourie collects an award for Doolhof

Tiaan Burger collecting Welbedacht's award

Neil Marais from Dunstone with their award

Corinne Borman of sponsors Mutual and Federal presented the awards

Chef explains what we will be eating

All the award winners together

The starter of very good local Springbok carpaccio with rocket, blueberries, toasted pine nuts and shaving of mature goat's cheese

A display of the winning wines

The main course was a duo of lamb. Perfectly cooked lamb cutlets and long slow cooked lamb in small filo parcels seared with a Rosemary Jus, a mint jelly, herb encrusted potato cylinders and young green beans

A glass of Dunstone 2012 Shiraz please

Chef strikes a pose

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A pelican glides past cattle drinking at a Durbanville dam

In this week’s MENU:

KWV Paarl Awards

Grande Roche

Diemersdal launches the first South African Grüner Veltliner wine

Pretty Yende at the Baxter

Lunch at The Twelve Apostles

Vinimark/Wine Worx Trade Tasting at Crystal Towers

Hartenberg, Klein Constantia and Radford Dale Trade Tasting

Tim Noakes

Quest for the Best of Wellington

This week’s recipe: Honeycomb

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 – This cold weather does make one think of sustaining food and risotto certainly fits the bill. If you are longing for a wonderful mushroom or prawn risotto, we have the perfect Italian rice, Violone Nano, which is best with seafood and Carnaroli for those with chicken or butternut and goats’ cheese, or even a simple saffron and artichoke. See them all here

This is the wine awards and wine trade tasting time of year, so we have been quite busy

KWV Paarl Awards Off to a glamorous dinner in KWV’s Cathedral Cellar on quite a chilly night, but we were warm enough with lots of space heaters placed in this cavernous cellar, filled with huge old carved vats from the past. They don’t actually use these much any more as things have become much more high tech, but it is a place with huge atmosphere. Lynne was first taken to visit by a young winemaker when she was only 17 and it hasn’t changed as much as she has. READ ON .....

Grande Roche How fortuitous it is when invitations collide. We were asked if we would like to spend a night at Grande Roche and it meant we didn’t need to drive back to Cape Town after the KWV event. We have visited it many times before for meals, wine tasting events and the Old Mutual Trophy Feedback sessions each year but this was our first stay. READ ON .....

Diemersdal launches the first South African Grüner Veltliner wine Why did Diemersdal make a Grüne Veltliner?” Because I like the grape and the wine” said the winemaker Thys Louw. Good answer! and he has had the patience to plant the grapes and wait the required years for the vines to mature and he has now bottled this lovely fresh and lively white wine, which is much more common in Austria than anywhere else in the world. We think this will be a commercial success too. READ ON .....

Pretty Yende at the Baxter We are both avid opera and classical music fans and we don’t attend concerts enough, but when Lynne saw the Diemersfontein sponsored Pretty Yende concert advertised, she knew she had found a solution to John’s quest for her birthday gift. It was a marvellous recital with many other good soloists and students from Cape Town Opera and the UCT school of music. And all the proceeds go to support these worthy institutions. We produce such amazing singing talent in this country.

Lunch at The Twelve Apostles The weather has been slightly spring-like for the last week and now is back to cold rainy and miserable, but Sunday was a lovely exception and we had the good luck to have been invited by the 12 Apostles to visit and try out their Sunday buffet at Azure restaurant. We sat on the terrace, enjoyed the sunshine and watched whales dance in the bay while enjoying our lunch and some good wines. READ ON .....

Vinimark/Wine Worx Trade Tasting at Crystal Towers These trade tastings are always well attended. So well, in fact, this time that, at about 5.30, Lynne suggested that one of the wine makers should stand on a chair and say loudly “OK, all Sommeliers back to work please” . (Of course he didn’t). It was Monday and not many of them were working that night. It was rather crowded and there were lots of good wines from great producers to taste. READ ON .....

Dave Nel’s Hartenberg, Klein Constantia and Radford Dale Trade Tasting This was held at the Wild Fig restaurant from 3 pm and, although we didn’t have that much time due to another engagement at 5, we managed to have a good tasting and talk intelligently (we hope!) to the winemakers and marketers of these wine. The canapés produced are really worth a mention. Lynne has never been to this restaurant and we think we need to soon if this is an indication of their food. READ ON .....

Tim Noakes A chance to hear Professor Tim Noakes talking again, this time to the curious media and some of the converted, about The Real Meal Revolution which is really taking off in Cape Town and in the rest of the country. Brian Berkman had also organised some suppliers of suitable produce and we could taste good full cream yoghurts, nut butters, seeds, nuts, wraps and smoothies from Kauai , some low or no carb foods, excellent ice cream and there were even cakes biscuits and sweets made with Xylotol. READ ON .....

Quest for the Best of Wellington David Sonnenberg told us that Wellington is much closer to Town than Franschhoek and that it is also a gem of a wine valley. This was at this award ceremony, held in a fairly new venue, Au’ de Hex Boutique Hotel in Wellington, where Jan van Schalkwyk (chef owner of Twist Some More restaurant) produced a really good menu to match the winning wines. READ ON .....

This week’s recipe is for Honeycomb This is something Lynne has always wanted to make, but has never got as far as finding out how. In the PR material they gave us at The Twelve Apostles was a book containing the recipe, which looks as easy as pie, so she thought she would share it with you. No cooking has been done this week at all and next week looks pretty busy, but soon we will have guests and this will be part of the dessert.

250ml corn or glucose syrup – 250g granulated sugar – 1 T white vinegar – 1 T baking soda, sieved

Dissolve the sugar in the syrup and vinegar over a medium heat. Turn the heat up and boil until the syrup turns a light caramel colour. Take the pan off the heat and quickly stir in the baking soda, then pour into a high sided baking sheet lined with parchment paper and greased with butter. Leave to cool and do NOT refrigerate.

You can crumble this and serve with ice cream, on top of trifle, on chocolate puddings or soufflés or just cut it into bars and dip in chocolate for an old fashioned treat.

You can guy glucose syrup at CAB factory shop in Brackenfell

Food and wine (and a few other) events for you to enjoy

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, will soon start a new series of short courses in baking. Check the ad in our blog page or 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.

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 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

14th August 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.

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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 they do creep in occasionally, for which we apologise. Our Avast!^® Anti-Virus software is updated at least daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.

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PR-Net Trade’s LCHF presentation by Professor Tim Noakes

A chance to hear Professor Tim Noakes talking again, this time to the curious media and some of the converted, about The Real Meal Revolution, which is really taking off in Cape Town and in the rest of the country. Brian Berkman had also organised some suppliers of suitable produce and we could taste good full cream yoghurts, nut butters, seeds, nuts, wraps and smoothies from Kauai , some low or no carb foods, excellent ice cream and there were even cakes biscuits and sweets made with Xylotol.

Delicious nut butters. Lynne found that they go well in good plain yoghurt.

We needed some convincing about the coconut oils but they did a good sales job. Whether John who loathes coconut will be able to taste it in food is going to be the big question

Julie Carter of Ocean Jewels fish with Errieda Du Toit

The best example of the efficacy of the Banting diet is Brian Berkman. It has changed his life since he developed diabetes and he has lost huge amounts of weight on this life style

The man who started the revolution, Dr Tim Noakes

telling his tale

and explaining how it works, scientifically

Some sceptics and some converts. There were some very interesting questions after his speech

Nelia Vivier asks a question and tells how much weight she has lost

Kauai told us how they have changed their menu to help people who are “Banting”

Copies of the book were bought and signed

and anecdotes were swapped

We were given goodie bags of Caring Candies made with Xylotol. Should we be eating any sweets?

.... or cakes and biscuits?

Lovely fresh fish from Ocean Jewels

Julie Carter is herself a convert and has lost a lot of weight

Nuts and seeds on show

and another coconut supplier

Everyone wanted their photo taken with Tim Noakes

Janine van Zyl has produced a great range of Cold Gold ice creams for people on the diet and with dairy and gluten allergies or intolerances. Lynne tasted and they were divine. No fake flavours at all

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