Durbanville's Feat of the Grape

Durbanville, sensibly, decided to have their Feast of the Grape Harvest festival on our Freedom Day public holiday on Wednesday, so off we went with John’s daughter Clare and all our Dutch visitors in tow. First to Durbanville Hills, where there was lots going on,

including tots crushing grapes by foot in a paddling pool and having a whale of a time.

We did a quick tasting, especially loved the Biesjes Craal Sauvignon Blanc and the Rhinofields Shiraz. The girls had a mid morning coffee and then off we pushed to see Oliver Parker at Altydgedacht. This year we were able to taste and buy the Ollo white blend and the lovely light Tygervalley Rosé, made from Cabernet franc, and loved the Gewürztraminer and the 2011 Sauvignon Blanc. We had our first taste of a 2012 Sauvignon, but it needs time to learn good manners, which it will undoubtedly do. Sadly the Gamay and the Cabernet franc are sold out, but we are sure Oliver is very happy about that.

We turned back to Nitida, where we saw racks of grapes drying on beds of straw and Nitida proteas, in preparation for making a Vin de Paille

Bernhard & Peta Veller, Nitida owners, having fun 

Peta Veller Opening a bottle of Nitida sauvignon

and after our expensive snacking at Wellington we decided to have a sit down meal in Cassia and were fortunate to get a table. Most had the huge burgers with potato wedges,

Yvonne had a fig, ham and cheese salad

and Lynne had a great duck salad.

We drank a bottle or two of Nitida Sauvignon Blanc and one person succumbed to the mini Pavlova.

Then off for the late afternoon view from De Grendel’s terrace, a sight of their new restaurant,

and a taste of their lovely wines before heading home.

Errieda du Toit, Durbanville Wine Valley PR

Wellington harvest festival

On Sunday, we hied off to Wellington for their festival, saw some lovely people and drank some lovely wines. First stop was  Diemersfontein,

where we were welcomed by a very trim David Sonnenberg, enjoyed the full tasting, ate a little sushi and left with a couple of bottles of Carpe Diem Chenin blanc, quite glorious. Then, off to Bovlei

where Bubbly and Oysters were on offer –

our friends and John demolished 12 each (at a bargain R7 each) in very short order, while we tasted some of the wines and bought a box of their inexpensive Gewürztraminer to serve with winter curries and some of their good white grape juice for our teetotal friends. We left with a wicked packet of slap chips, BAD. Down the valley to Dunstone, where we had a quick tasting and ate nothing.

Then to gorgeous Nabygelegen to admire their restored ancient tasting room, which was a ruin when we were last there. James McKenzie has done a great and sympathetic restoration.

We tasted the wines and Lynne bought a case of their really good Merlot, which doesn’t show any green stalkiness or mint and is full of sweet ripe fruit and some chalky tannins, pointing to a short life in our cellar before drinking. We could also not resist the prawns, calamari and mussels they were serving, so had plates of those, well-matched with a bottle of the Lady Anna chenin sauvignon blend for the three passengers. The problem with the grazing on each farm is that you spend quite a lot of money, but in this case it was really good value and worth it. Yes, they came with more chips. Not a vegetable in sight in Wellington... Our final stop was at Welbedacht where we chatted with Rob Gower who is working there at the moment and also Schalk Burger senior, his winemaker son Tiaan

and, of course, Mugabe the shar pei (Schalk says he is planning to take over the farm)

while we tasted through the wines. John bought a box of the barrel matured Chenin. Stormers captain, Schalk junior, who is recovering from an injury sustained in the first Super 15 match of the season, had the afternoon off. What a friendly place Wellington is.

Lunch at Babel - amazing Gardens and Food

It can often be disappointing when you finally get to a restaurant which everyone has been talking about. Other than missing the garden tour (mea culpa, says Lynne who got the start time wrong), Babel absolutely lived up to expectations. Babylonstoren farm is officially in Paarl, but it is on the other side of the N1, on the same apparently unnamed road near Simondium as Backsberg and Glen Carlou, on the way to Franschhoek. We could not find a name for the road on the many maps we consulted, including Google Earth.

Someone brilliant planned and planted these amazing gardens

and a huge staff of friendly, well trained people manicures and tends them, producing the most amazing looking fruit and vegetables.

There are also chickens and ducks and, soon, there will be mushrooms. The tour of the gardens starts at 10, so you need an early start from Cape Town and the tour takes about an hour and a half, which then leaves one rather tired and hungry, with quite a long gap before lunch unless, of course, you have a snack  at the small Conservatory café or book lunch for 12 o’clock. We wandered through the gardens unguided and had lots to admire, as the mixed plantings are done sympathetically and in a very orderly manner. We sat down for a cup of coffee in the café and, finally, it was time for lunch.

All the food is sourced from the garden or locally and the menu is seasonal. Some of our friends had been before, so they knew the drill of ordering each of the three coloured salads, a Green (R50), a Yellow (R60) and a Red (R55) as starters.

These are a mix of fruit and vegetable, raw and cooked in the appropriate colours, fairly plainly seasoned and they are a great meal option for vegetarians. The eight of us all had large main courses, which were also accompanied by huge platter of roasted aubergines topped with basil pesto, roasted pears and rather chewy raw fennel

and with another platter of the most delicious crisp (duck fat?) chunky chips. Yes, Lynne succumbed to a couple. There were huge lamb cutlets, perfectly pink (R140) in a gooseberry, lemon, caper & mint pesto,

Franschhoek Trout with a Kei apple (a miniature indigenous apple tree) sauce.

Lynne had a huge portion of rather fatty and rich belly of pork in a superb Vygie (local sour fruit from a succulent) liquor, with fresh figs and crackling.

John’s choice was  a huge sirloin steak with an olive and shiraz sauce. This was ordered medium rare, but arrived close to bleu, so it was a tiny bit chewy. The portion was so large that he could not finish it.

Saucing is very good, but sometimes a little sparse. None of us could cope with dessert so we ended on good coffees. The bill was R415 per couple including 3 bottles of Anura Sauvignon Blanc (at a very fair R70) and service, which we think is very reasonable for this level of cuisine. You do have to book well in advance to get a table.

120308 Main Ingredient’s MENU - Babel at the Taj, RMB Starlight Concert at Vergelegen, Champagne Pommery tasting, Mullineux wines, Jamaican Jerked Chicken, Products, Our market activities, events and restaurants

MENU

Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal

Gourmet Foods, Ingredients & Fine Wines

Eat In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010

www.mainingredient.biz - http://www.adamastorbacchus.com/

Click here to Subscribe to MENU or to contact us

Click on underlined and Bold words to open links to pictures, blogs, websites or more information

Vergelegen and its ancient camphor trees at midnight

In this week’s MENU:

     Babel at the Taj

     RMB Starlight Concert at Vergelegen

     Champagne Pommery tasting

     Mullineux wines

     Jamaican Jerked Chicken

     Products

     Our market activities, events and restaurants

Taj for Babel     Have you ever tasted a white pinotage? Strictly speaking, this wine should be called a Blanc de noir, (a white wine from red grapes). We tasted it at the Paarl and Wellington wine tasting, held before the “Expressions of Paarl and Wellington” launch dinner in Mint restaurant at the Taj last Thursday night. Another farm made a white cabernet sauvignon previously, but this was made by putting a red grape through reverse osmosis, which removes all the colour (and most of the flavour). The Mellasat white pinotage is made fairly conventionally, with minimal skin contact, but is rather a strange expression of the grape because it does not show recognisable characteristics of the base wine or of its parents Pinot Noir or Hermitage (Cinsaut), but it was nevertheless quite quaffable. We found similarities to white Zinfandel. We preferred their flagship red, called M, a Cape blend of Cabernet, Shiraz and Pinotage.

This series of dinners, prefaced by a wine tasting on the launch evening, gives you a chance to meet and chat to the wine makers and marketers while tasting some delicious wines. And you don’t have to book for dinner to come and taste the wines. Click here to see the programme for these monthly tastings and the monthly Expressions dinner themes in the Mint restaurant.

The dinner was very, very good. Babel on Babylonstoren seems to be the flavour of the summer this year, bookings are hard to get, so it was good to be able to see what the chef Simoné Rossouw is doing.  We were welcomed with a glass of Welbedacht Mon René MCC and the dinner started with one of her famous Green Salads, a plate full of green vegetables and herbs and flowers with a mint geranium dressing; it was very refreshing. This was accompanied by Mischa Rousanne 2011. The main course was a stunning surprise. Large fillets of Franschhoek smoked trout, lightly cooked with a superb strawberry and Viognier sauce. Lynne had done a similar dish earlier in the week using pomegranate molasses, fish sauce and lime but the strawberry was superior by far. Who would have thought that strawberry would so complement smoked trout? This was served with the Bosman Chenin Blanc 2009 and the Doolhof Malbec 2009, so you could have the colour you preferred with fish. Several of the other guests liked the Malbec with the fish, there being enough fruit to work with the strawberry and smoky flavours, but we preferred the more delicate flavour of the Chenin.

Then came a stunning dessert; a chilled plum soup with plum sorbet which had lovely undertones of five spice. It was served with a glass of their MCC, which had been augmented by the Babylonstoren homemade plum cordial. We can still taste the clean fresh plum flavours and want more!

A fourth course of Gorgonzola Crème brulée with almond and Parma ham crisp was a fabulous, if very rich, ending to a lovely meal. This was served with Andreas Shiraz 2009 and one of our favourite dessert wines, Glen Carlou’s The Welder Natural Sweet Chenin Blanc 2011. Please note that several of these courses have been incorporated into Mint’s menu for the whole month of March should you wish to try them. The wines are also available for tasting with the food. Pictures can be seen here.

Brilliant Starlight Concert     We had the most stunning evening at this annual tour de force concert at Vergelegen, where they showcased local talent this year. Lynne usually drops an emotional tear or two at the sheer wonderment of the performances. This time the South African Youth Choir and the full Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra started with the Nation Anthem and continued with a tribute to Nelson Mandela - a superb arrangement of The Impossible Dream, from Man of La Mancha. We rocked the night away with Freddie Mercury and Queen songs, performed by the orchestra and Joseph Clark, our local expert Freddie Mercury impersonator. Several numbers had the audience bopping, rocking and singing in the aisles. We had performances from two stunning (local) opera singers Musa Nkuna, who had returned for the concert from the Berlin Opera, where he is performing and Friedel Mitas, whose beautiful soprano voice is clear as a bell. Nomfundo Xaluva had us singing along and swaying to all the wonderful Miriam Makeba and Brenda Fassie songs, backed by the Choir. Charlize Berg - talented 19 year old Afrikaans vocalist sang a selection of Afrikaans songs as a tribute to the late Johannes Kerkorrel. Ian von Memerty skilfully and professionally produced the whole event and also performed and delighted us. But the star of the evening is always Richard Cock, the maestro conductor, whose humour and knowledge gathers this whole concert together so well. We had a very funny audience participation in the 1812 Overture, where we were the cannons, bursting brown paper bags – hysterical. And there were many, many more talented acts. Thank you all at Rand Merchant Bank for organising and sponsoring yet another blockbuster concert. Click here to see a selection of Photographs.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any better     We were invited to a trade tasting of Pommery Champagne at the Taj (again!) this week, paired with food made in the Mint restaurant, which has a very suitable Mezzanine venue for guided tastings. We started with the Brut Royal, which was elegantly accompanied by a West Coast oyster. Lots of Crus are blended in this non vintage champagne, which has a lovely brioche nose and is full of sweet fruit flavours, but finishes dry. Then, enormous Salmon sashimi rolls accompanied the delicious Brut Rosé which has an addition of red wine to colour the champagne. It is crisp and clean with delicious strawberry fruit nuances, but is also dry as a bone - a very good accompaniment to food. Duck confit parcels with spiced kumquat preserve accompanied Lynne’s favourite, the Blanc de Blanc (100% Chardonnay), “Summertime”. It gave a nice counterpoint to the rich duck and orange flavours, full of perfume and violets; it is very clean and lean on the palate with lime, lemon and grapefruit notes. Then slices of rare ostrich, topped with berry chutney, were served to accompany the Blanc de Noir “Wintertime”. Yeasty and complex on the nose, this fills the mouth with prunes, plums and other pink fruits, with a very long follow through and rich mouth feel of pinot noir.

This evening, just in time to make it into this week’s MENU, we enjoyed a tasting of Mullineux Family wines (from Riebeek-Kasteel) at French Toast at the top of Bree Street. Chris and Andrea Mullineux are enjoying a meteoric rise in reputation and enjoy the distinction of earning five stars for their Syrah in the current John Platter guide. We started with the more affordable Kloof Street range, Chenin Blanc and Swartland Rouge. These are priced at under R100 and both earned 4 stars in Platter. The Rouge is in the Rhône tradition, 73% Syrah with Mourvedre, Cinsaut, Carignan and Grenache; a perfumed nose with spicy rich fruit flavour. The barrel-fermented Chenin is rich with a mineral undertone. Both Kloof Street wines are delicious and accessible. The Mullineux White blend (Chenin Blanc with Clairette Blanche and Viognier) has a mineral base with peachy citrus flavour. After tasting the Whites and the Kloof Street Rouge, we moved on to the Flagships, the Mullineux Syrah range. The Mullineux Syrah 2010 is wonderful; rich spicy perfume, with signature black pepper, dark fruit and herbs. In addition to this moderately expensive wine, there are two premium, single vineyard versions of this wine, Granite and Schist. Both are accessible now, but they will benefit from a few years careful rest. They are expensive: R675 per bottle each, so most of us will need to save up to enjoy them. This is a premium range of wines and you will find them at specialist wine merchants like Wine Concepts. The 2011 Chenin blanc Straw Wine was very popular, so much so that we took too long tasting the reds and it had all gone by the time we were ready for it. French Toast served very good canapés, lovely soft chicken kebabs and (our favourite) a small mélange of prawn, calamari and fish in tempura with a soft spicy undertone which complemented the wines, even the lighter red.

This week’s recipe should add a dash of spice to your life:

JAMAICAN JERKED CHICKEN

25g Allspice Berries - 5 cm stick of Cinnamon - 1 teaspoon freshly grated Nutmeg -1 red chilli, seeded and chopped - 4 spring onions thinly sliced - 1 Bay Leaf crumbled -Sea Salt and freshly ground Black Pepper - 1 Tablespoon dark Rum - 6 chicken pieces

To make the seasoning, pound all the ingredients (other than the chicken) to a thick paste in a pestle and mortar or in a food processor. Slash the chicken pieces deeply on the skin side and rub the paste all over them. Cover, and leave in the fridge for 1 to 2 hours. Roast, grill or braai the chicken till cooked - approx. 20 minutes. Serve with a salad and, for those not dieting, rice. You could make a good salsa to go with this, using fresh pineapple, tomatoes, spring onions and avocado.

Products     We have had to put in increased stock levels of the truffle balsamic reduction, and have added a white balsamic reduction and a chilli reduction, all from Italy. Goose fat and duck fat are on our table and the Spanish products, especially Paella rice and smoked paprika are popular. Thank you, again, Rick Stein. We also have Spanish sherry vinegar. Rose water and Orange blossom water are also being asked for and we have increased our stock level. Mediterranean/ North African flavours are still all the rage and we can hardly keep up with demand for Ras el hanout, Sumac and Za'ataar. French patés are flying out and we have a half-price special on a short-dated, very luxurious goose paté. They are all in our product list. Check it here.

If you are looking for anything, have a look at our product list and tell us what you want. You will be able to access it through our website. If you can’t find what you need, let us know and we will try to find it for you. Until our online shop is ready, drop us an email and we will help you. We are very happy to see that traffic on our website is increasing and more orders are coming from it. The financial year end has put a temporary halt to work on our online shop. The financial year end has but a stop to work on on-line developments, but we intend to concentrate on it in March.

We have a lot of fun putting MENU together each week and, of course, doing the things we write about, but making it possible for you to enjoy rare and wonderful gourmet foods is what drives our business. We stock a good range of ingredients and delicious ready-made gourmet foods. You can contact us by email or phone, or through our website. We can send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa.

Our market activities    We will be back at Long Beach Mall tomorrow, Friday, 9th March for our South Peninsula friends and we will be at the Old Biscuit Mill’s brilliant, exciting and atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00 and every Saturday.

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 month for which we have information. To help you choose an event to visit, click on our list for March, April and beyond. All the events are listed in date order and we already have exciting events to entertain you through into the new year. Click here to access the list. You will need to be connected to the internet.

Some restaurants have responded to our request for an update of their special offers and we have, therefore, updated our list of restaurant special offers. Click here to access it. These Specials have been sent to us by the restaurants or their PR agencies. We have not personally tried all of them and their listing here should not always be taken as a recommendation from ourselves. If they don’t update us, we can’t be responsible for any inaccuracies in the list. When we have tried it, we’ve put in our observations. We have cut out the flowery adjectives etc. that so many have sent, to give you the essentials. Click on the name to access the relevant website. All communication should be with the individual restaurants.

Summer time is picnic time and several wine farms offer picnic facilities. We have put together a list of wine farms who can provide you with a picnic, We haven’t put in much detail, just where it is, phone number, email address and a link to the website. The latter is where you will find all the important information. Go and check it out.

1st March 2012

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 product list 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 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 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.

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 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.

This electronic journal has been sent to you because you have personally subscribed to it or because someone you know has asked us to send it to you or forwarded it to you themselves. Addresses given to us will not be divulged to any person or organisation. We collect them only for our own promotional purposes and keep our mailing list strictly confidential. If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please click here to send us a message and if you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please click here to send us a message.

CHILLING AT CAPE POINT VINEYARDS

It has been a busy week for us and it didn’t let up. We love this time of year because it is when friends visit from all over the world and March has brought us friends from Holland, Germany, Australia and England, so there is a lot to fit in and a lot of entertaining to do. However, we spent our 9th wedding anniversary working at the market in Long Beach and then, as we had been invited by Duncan Savage, Cape Point Vineyards winemaker, we went to have a romantic sundowner on their lawn.

They really do these picnics properly. You get groundsheets, huge cushions to laze on and really friendly staff bring you your wine, with good glasses, and, if you want supper, your picnic basket.

We bought a bottle of Splattered Toad Sauvignon blanc and spent two stolen hours watching the sun go down; definitely the best place to chill after a heavy week’s work.

They do have a tented marquee with tables and chairs should you not be a lawn lizard.

We will definitely return for the picnic with some of our friends. Lovely birdlife there and a splendid view

FOOD AT THE BARN

We have been promising ourselves a return visit to the Food Barn in Noordhoek Farm Village, because we love Franck’s food.

We started the celebration with a glass of Môreson’s Miss Molly MCC, 100% Chardonnay, at R40 a glass and we were each presented with a delicious appetiser of deep fried haloumi in one Chinese spoon and a prawn in an Asian sauce in the other.

We opted for the Summer Bistro Menu, priced at R220 for three courses and some of the courses were delicious.

We ordered a carafe of Newton Johnson Felicité Pinot Noir (R42),

which was the wine matched to the starter we both could not resist: Fresh figs, sweet cured San Daniele Ham and deep fried Taleggio balls, mesclun leaves dressed with a sweet balsamic reduction, fresh, gooey, sweet and salty – the dish of the evening.

John had rather firm and very salty gnocchi with home-smoked salmon for his main

and Lynne very pink (as it should be) rack of Karoo lamb.

John’s dessert was, predictably, the Chocolate marquise.

Special mention goes to the wonderful dessert Lynne had. A rich, hot almond sabayon ‘soup’ with hot strawberries and raspberries, breathtakingly good.

Floating on top is an almond tuille bearing a fig scented ice cream; definitely one to try to make at home for a special occasion. We would have liked to have tried the Nitida special menu but it is a little bit more expensive than we can afford right now at R480 pp with wine.

We had excellent service from Matthew, who earned a generous tip