This pelican flew past us at
Landtscap on Sunday at The White Hot wine awards
In
this week’s MENU:
Seductive
Sauvignons Festival at The Vineyard
RisCura
White Hot Wine Awards
Season
of Sauvignon in Durbanville
Wellington
Wines “Quest for the Best” Showcase
Decanter winners
Real Marzipan
This week’s Product menu: We have a full stock of the Nielsen Massey real
extracts for baking and desserts. See our recipe below. Flavours are vanilla,
chocolate, coffee,almond, orange, lemon, mint, rosewater and orange blossom
water. Our online shop shows our range of
rare and exciting products which you are unlikely to find elsewhere in South
Africa. See it here
Our market activities Come and visit us at the Old Biscuit Mill’s
wonderfully exciting, atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday and every Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00. Tip: Some visitors
tell us how they struggle to find parking. It’s quite easy if you know how. Click here for a map which shows where we park.
Another late night: Restrictions imposed by all the Internet
service providers mean that we can only send to 400 addresses per hour, so MENU
may only reach some of you about 24 hours after we start sending, and we have
to send it this late because we have had so many events to report on that we
have only just finished writing – at nearly 2am. We thank you for your
patience!
Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur Our
Jewish readers will have started your New Year celebrations on Wednesday. We
wish you all a blessed year and that all will be well for you at Yom Kippur.
Seductive Sauvignons Festival at The
Vineyard Mike Duggan and Corlien Morris of Wine
Concepts hold this festival annually at this time of the year and it is usually
the best place to taste the newly released Sauvignons blancs and some very good
Cabernet Sauvignons. This year, the farms were also encouraged to show older
Sauvignons blanc and we tasted some amazing wines. Do get the message: white
wines also improve with age. OK, perhaps not the inexpensive over-sulphured
R19.50 bottle from the supermarket that has to taste the same year in year out,
but most well made single varietals and many blends will surprise and reward
you.
The wine everyone was talking about was David Nieuwoudt’s
2012 Cederberg Ghost Corner wooded Sauvignon blanc, which has just won a
prestigious International Trophy at the Decanter awards. Oak Valley had a 2003 Sauvignon blanc which was still fresh and
lively and so drinkable but their current release 2012 was also very good. Springfield
showed not only their new releases – we particularly liked the Life From Stone
and their three older wines which had aged really well. Steenberg Black Swan,
Iona 2012, Cape Point, Constantia Glen, De Grendel , Glen Carlou, Le Riche
Cabernet, Edgebaston… all the usual
suspects were terrific. This is a very good year for Sauvignons blanc of all
styles.
There were so many Sauvignons blanc to taste and we
have to confess that, again, we only managed a very quick run around tasting of
the Cabernets at the end. Those we tasted were all very enjoyable.
A question of the evening is “Where does The Vineyard
(which Mike Duggan named as the Wine Destination Hotel of the Cape) buy the
huge prawns that they serve as canapés at these events?”. They are the best we
and others have ever been served or bought in Cape Town. Their rice pasta
paella also went down a treat as it didn’t clash with the wines.
RisCura White Hot Wine Awards We go to a lot of functions and, now and
then, we discover a new venue. On Sunday, it was not just a fantastic new venue
but also a beautiful new scenic drive into Devonvale from Bottelary. Landtscap is on the top of a very
high hill looking out over Stellenbosch mountains and at the Paardeberg
mountains on their extreme left then across to the Helderberg on the right.
Very modern, exciting and very adaptable in space, this was the venue for these
awards. It was also beautifully decorated with white flowers for the first day
of Spring.
The very talented chef from The Foodbarn in Noordhoek,
Franck Dangereaux did the innovative and delicious food and the Sponsors RisCura
put on a very good event for their customers, staff and the media.
The judges were Christiaan Eedes, James Pietersen and
Roland Peens. The three equal winners – all different Bordeaux blends of
Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon - were Caroline Rillema’s 2012 Celestina from
Elim, Tokara’s 2011 Director’s Reserve and Steenberg’s Magna Carta 2011. All
are typical examples of beautifully made white blends but all are labelled
Sauvignon Blanc. Click here to see more
Season of Sauvignon in Durbanville On Wednesday, we attended the media launch of Durbanville’s Season of
Sauvignon which, this year, will take place on the individual farms on Saturday
and Sunday, the 5th and 6th of October. We had a lovely
experience talking to the winemakers, tasting the wines and food prepared and
matched to the wines by four of the local chefs. This event was held on Klein
Roosboom Farm. Click here to see all the photographs and our comments
Wellington Wines “Quest for the Best”
Showcase Later on Wednesday, we drove back to town to the
Waterfront Southern Sun Hotel for a tasting of the wines of Wellington. This
precedes their festival which will be held on the different farms next Saturday,
the 14th of September. Click here to see their site. And
here to see the photographs and comments. They had a top 10 table which
included 2 white wines, 7 red wines and Bain’s Whisky and all were good. There
were tables of different varietals. We especially liked the four Cabernets they
had to taste. We think Wellington might have really good terroir for this grape
as all were full of flavour and depth, without any greenness or over-tannic flavours.
The Shirazes are also suited to our taste and there was an interesting Petit
Verdot from Diemersfontein, redolent with fresh violets on the nose with wild
and gamey flavours. Pictures from the tasting here
Decanter winners These
prestigious awards by the British Decanter Magazine have just been announced
and South African wines have done extremely well. Click here to see the list of
the major awards and medals. You can also go and look at Decanters web page to look at all
the awards. We are rather pleased (and not a tiny bit self satisfied!) at these
awards as many of the winning wines are wines we have recommended to you over
the last year.
This week’s recipe A
few days ago we heard a customer of ours on John Maytham’s Cape Talk afternoon
show asking for a recipe for real marzipan, as he wanted something better than
the Persipan (horrid stuff) available in supermarkets. He then gave us a
wonderful plug as we do indeed stock the real Almond Extract from Nielsen
Massey in the USA that is an essential ingredient in this recipe. As September
is the month in which you should be making your Christmas cakes and pudding for
this year, we thought we would reward him, and you, with the recipe. Marzipan
is incredibly easy to make, if you have the right ingredients. You don’t have
to keep it for cakes, you can make it into bars and coat them with melted
chocolate using our Callebaut 70% chocolate buttons or petit fours or even cute
marzipan animals or fruit to decorate cakes. If you dislike marzipan we would
encourage you to come and smell the real extract, it might well change your
mind. We don’t regularly stock ground almonds, but we can obtain them on order
for you as well. We find that this can keep well for a while in a plastic bag
in the fridge if you are unable to use it all at once.
Real Marzipan
125g icing sugar – 125g caster sugar – 250g
ground almonds – 1 t lemon juice – 1 egg, beaten – Real almond extract to taste
Sift the two sugars into a bowl and mix in the ground
almonds. Add the lemon juice and a few drops of the almond extract. Gradually
stir in the beaten egg with a spatula or spoon until the mixture is a firm and
manageable dough. Knead lightly and roll out. This quantity makes enough to
cover a 18 cm cake. Double up for more. Or shape into bars and dip them in melted
chocolate.
Buying from us On Line 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 on line shop. We can send your requirements to you anywhere
in South Africa. Please do not pay
until we have confirmed availability and invoiced you, then you pay and then we
deliver or post. When you make
an eft payment, make sure that it says who you are. Use the form on the website
to email us your order. Click here to see our OnLine Shop.
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 see what’s
happening in our world of food and wine (and a few other cultural events), visit
our Events Calendar.
It needs updating and we’ll do that tomorrow. All the events are listed in date
order and we already have a large number of exciting events to entertain you
right through the year.
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.
Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. We plan to visit
their French establishment after Vinexpo. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.
Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs evening cooking classes at Sense of Taste, his
catering company in Maitland. We can recommend them very highly, having enjoyed
his seafood course. Check
his programme here. Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has cooking
classes in Fish Hoek 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 Wednesday evenings. She trained with
Raymond Blanc, and has been a professional chef for 25 years. More info here
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 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! ®
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