Adamastor & Bacchus Gourmet Wine & Food Adventures

Experience the beauty of South Africa’s Wine Country

and the excellence of our wines with an experienced, qualified wine guide and photographer who has a thorough knowledge of the Cape’s wines and the land of their creation. Enjoy its wineries, vineyards and restaurants, the beauty of its mountains, unique flora and architecture

Sample Tours

1 Day Tour   visiting Buitenverwachting in Constantia, Grangehurst in the Helderberg ward, light lunch and tasting at Morgenhof, followed by a visit to Bellevue before returning to Cape Town

2 Day Tour   visiting High Constantia, Annandale and Jordan in Stellenbosch, Landskroon in Paarl, Cabrière and Boekenhoutskloof in Franschhoek, returning to Cape Town via the beautiful Banhoek Valley

3 Day Tour   visiting Walker Bay and Elgin, Stellenbosch and the Helderberg, Paarl, Wellington and Franschhoek

Taste the wines in the cellars with the winemakers

Enjoy gourmet food in some of our great winelands restaurants

We’ll tailor your tour to suit your interests

Click here for further details, for our rates and to book

veileider snakker norsk – reiseleiter spricht Deutsch – toerleier praat Afrikaans

Accredited Wine Industry Specialist Guide - Cape Wine Academy Diploma
Diploma in Photography (UK)
Satour Reg. No. T4570

All text & Images © John Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2014

Main Ingredient's MENU - Christmas dinner, Chapmans Peak seafood, Jardine at Jordan, Riesling Rocks

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Table Mountain and its tablecloth from Blouberg beach

In this week’s MENU:

 Christmas dinner

 Chapman’s Peak seafood supper

 Lunch at Jordan

 Riesling Rocks

Follow this link to see our Main Ingredient blogs, because to tell our whole story here would take too much space. Click on Bold words in the text of this edition to open links to pictures, blogs, pertinent websites or more information.

This week’s Product menu: If you are like us you are probably cutting back on what you eat after a rather indulgent Christmas and New Year.  We have lots of things in stock that add flavour. Our Raspberry and herb vinegars are amazing for salads or as marinades and we have lots and lot of unusual spices to add flavour to food. Rub Za'atar or sumac on chicken or fish. Add five spice powder or grains of Paradise to lean cuts of meat for the grill.  Have a look at our on-line shop and order now.

Wow, that seemed like a nice long holiday break. We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and celebrated the New Year with hope and joy and good company.

This is going to be just a short MENU this week to ease us into this wonderful, hopeful 2014. A year that we predict will be full of change. Next week we will have an extensive report on the Hemel and Aarde valley.

Christmas dinner     John’s daughter Clare joined us for Christmas dinner and Lynne made the promised Beef Wellington. She adapted a recipe from the internet to get the timing right and found that for a completely successful Beef Wellington, you need one essential piece of equipment: a meat thermometer which, luckily, she possesses. Instructed to cook a half kilo Wellington at 200°C for 20 minutes, she found that it simply was not long enough. Even in our fierce gas oven, the pastry had only just started to cook. It actually took just over an hour to reach the required internal temperature and was just as we like it, but using cheffy recipe timings sometimes does not work for your home oven, as they use commercial ovens. Because mushrooms are not popular in our house, she made a rich chicken liver and almond paté flavoured with orange liqueur, added some soft tinned chestnuts, spread this on pancakes and wrapped the seared fillet in those and then covered with great flaky pastry. Lovely flavours, and we enjoyed it much more than we would have enjoyed a turkey. She made a Madeira sauce using as its base one of the authentic French tinned sauces we sell (we haven’t seen Madeira in this country for years) and we had duck fat roast potatoes, minty green peas and glazed carrots.  We started with a duck rillette and finished with one of Lynne’s traditional luxury Christmas puddings, all the better or being a year old and nicely matured. It was flamed with brandy and served with brandy butter. See the food and the wines we served here

Sadly we learnt a costly and upsetting thermodynamic lesson. We served the Wellington on an heirloom Spode meat platter Lynne inherited from her grandmother and it was on our granite work surface. When we put the hot Wellington onto the cold dish on an even colder surface, it cracked with a loud bang from end to end. Now we need a solution to at least prevent it from breaking in half!

This is the time of the year when friends visit us from up-country and overseas and we take them to some of our favourite places. With friends we visited one of our favourite seaside places, Dunes pub and restaurant in Hout Bay on New Year’s day for some calamari and to get some sea air and had a lovely simple but well cooked meal and the wind helped to brush away the cobwebs of 2013 and the night before.

Then, this week, we made another trip to Hout Bay to Chapman’s Peak Hotel and it was great fun. Sadly, they don’t take bookings, so you need to go early and then wait in the bar until a table can be made available at this very popular restaurant filled with locals and people who have spent the day at the beach. It took us about 45 minutes to get a table and then quite a while to get served so, if you are impatient, this is not the place for you. Have a beer and chill out. Our waitress, UCT student Lucia, was tremendously helpful, cheerful and efficient. We have a British friend, who now lives in Greece, with us and we thought he would like to try their seafood and the good view. We chose Adi Badenhorst’s Secateurs Chenin blanc and it was a great complement to the food. Click here to see the photographs.

Yesterday, John guided a party of ex-pat South Africans, visiting home from Australia, on a wine tour. They visited Grangehurst, Annandale and Overgaauw before going to Jordan for a fabulous lunch and a tasting of the Jordan wines. They were a very happy party, who thoroughly enjoyed the day, the wines and being entertained by the winemakers. Pics of the lunch can be seen here

Riesling Rocks     After a pleasantly quiet start to the year, our calendar is starting to fill up again. One event this month which will be a highlight is the annual Riesling Rocks festival at Hartenberg on Saturday, January 25th. We have not been able to enjoy it properly in the past because we worked in the market on Saturdays, but this time we will be able to enjoy a relaxed day at Hartenberg and we look forward to seeing you there.

News of various Harvest Festivals is coming through thick and fast, so do check out our Events Calendar for details.

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.

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 see what’s happening in our world of food and wine (and a few other cultural events), visit our Events Calendar. 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. 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.

Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. A calendar of their classes can be seen here. Pete Ayub, who made 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

10th January 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.

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 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.

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. We own our mailing software 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.

Seafood supper at the Chapman's Peak Hotel

Sunset in the seaside town of Hout Bay

Chapman’s Peak Hotel restaurant is extremely popular with locals and visitors. They don’t do bookings so you need to go early to get a table or be prepared to wait up to an hour for a table but you can sit in the bar and have a drink while waiting. It is worth the wait. In the summer most of the tables are on the terrace which has a good view of the bay and they specialise in sea food with a nod to Portuguese.  It is child friendly and mostly non smoking, although they do have people who are addicted to smoking those electric machines which give off noxious vapours that do affect us non smokers. Banned in Europe and  America, we hope SA follows soon.

A starter of good crumbed calamari rings for our friend from Greece!

Lynne's starter was entitled Prawn Tease – no idea why, but they were good large prawns covered in a sticky sweet chilli sauce. Finger bowls are needed and are supplied

Johns starter of peeled prawns with chorizo sausage slices

This huge platter of seafood just for John included yellowtail, calamari and prawns with crisp chips and was very reasonable at R130

Lynne decided to go with the pork ribs and they were a very good choice, very tender with a good barbecue sauce. She did need help though as this is a huge portion. You get a choice with all the main course dishes being served with rice, chips, salad or vegetables.  Yes, she should have chosen the salad.

Only one of us could manage dessert and it was our visitor Terry, who had a similar plate of seafood for his main course to John's.  Unctuous rich chocolate tart with soft serve ice cream

The sun goes down and the lights come on and we continue to eat the great food

Our really helpful and sweet waitress UCT student Lucia

 

© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013

Lunch at Jardine on Jordan with tour clients

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013

Christmas dinner: Rillette and Boeuf Wellington with Macushla & Marlbrook '95

The table set for Christmas dinner 

Presents under the tree

Shannon Macushla Pinot Noir

 was an excellent partner for some duck rillette

The main course - no turkey!

Filet de Boeuf Wellington, ready for the oven

and ready to serve

with a 1995 Klein Constantia Marlbrook

which was simply beautiful

- who says SA wines don't age well? -

and a tribute to the skill of Ross Gower

who made it

The beef carved

and ready, with a French Sauce Madère,
enhanced with a little truffle

One of Lynne's wonderful Christmas puds to finish

with a splash of a 12 year old

© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013