Chenin Blanc Winter Showcase at Delaire Graff

The gathering on the spacious deck of Delaire Graff

President of the Chenin Growers Association, Ken Forrester, opens proceedings

Ben Kruger, CEO of the Standard Bank, tells us about their new sponsorship. It is a very worthy prize. He announced the signing of a three-year sponsorship agreement between the Chenin Blanc Association of South Africa and Standard Bank, in support of a new competition to be known as the Standard Bank Chenin Blanc Top Ten Challenge. The competition will be open to all the ± 100 Chenin Blanc Association members. Entries open on 1st July 2014.  An awards ceremony announcing the winners will take place at Delaire Graff Estate in Stellenbosch on Wednesday 27th August. Winners will receive R20 000 each and the money must be used for the economic and social upliftment of the workforce

Past president Jeff Grier of Villiera

The hand that rocks the cradle. Ina Smith is the Manager of the Association and keeps it all together with marvellously quiet and gentle organisation

Line up of the first flight of Chenins

We get down to serious tasting

Johann Laubser, GM of Delaire Graff, wine maker Morne Vrey and Ken Forrester listen to Geoff Grier in the background as he takes us through a flight of Chenin

Many lunchers on the terrace with one of the best views in Stellenbosch, up at the top of the Helshoogte pass

As the vines shut down after harvest, the leaves turn all sorts of pretty autumnal colours

Delaire Graff’s winemaker Morne Vrey on his way to lunch at Indochine restaurant

Calm blues and hints of the orient make this a comfortable place to have lunch

Sean Griffiths of Mulderbosch, Wade Bales and Alan Mullins

We meet Ben Kruger, CEO of the sponsor, Standard Bank

Handsome restaurant manager Alex von Ulmenstein with two of the Chenins previously tasted and now on offer to go with lunch

The lunch menu

The wines on offer

Ken Forrester thanks Ina Smith for all the very excellent organisation

Johann Laubser, GM of Delaire Graff, who sponsored the Showcase

Willie du Plessis of Standard Bank Marketing

Ken Forrester signing the agreement with Standard Bank

Sponsors and heads of the Chenin Blanc Association. CEO Ben Kruger of the sponsor Standard Bank, President Ken Forrester, Willie du Plessis of Standard Bank and Jeff Grier

Ken Forrester with a bucket of wonderful chenin

The Amuse was a seared tuna slice with broccoli and black garlic puree

Our starter was a beautifully presented arrangement of lovely flavours, textures and aromas. Daikon radish wrapped beef tartar and pickled mushrooms, flavoured with chilli, black bean puree, and ponzu served in pickled onion ‘cups’ and topped with crisp deep fried noodles

Writer Johan Crafford also having a great day

The main course was small pieces of chicken and prawn covered in a tikka masala sauce on a cauliflower puree with a fresh chutney and topped with a mini bok choy  We were very impressed with the food. The chef at Indochine, who works under Executive chef Christiaan Campbell, is indeed worthy of a mention - his name is Virgil Kahn

Ina Smith

Dessert looks deliciously simple and yet was full of very intense flavours.  Coconut ice cream, lime curd ice cream and a pineapple sorbet. With intricate and delicate spicing one tasted echoes of melktert, and coconut lime pie, but it was so fresh and light.  A masterstroke by the pastry chef.

Another autumn view of the Delaire Graff vineyards, hugging the hillside.

This impressive place is filled with great artworks

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013

Wilfred's 80th birthday

140410 Main Ingredient's MENU - Angala,The Vineyard’s Pinot Festival, Norma ‘The First Lady of South African wine’, Diet? No, change of lifestyle, Ranch Dressing

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A Sea Point sunset

In this week’s MENU:

 Angala

 The Vineyard’s Pinot Festival

 Norma, ‘The First Lady of South African wine’

 Diet? No, change of lifestyle

 Ranch Dressing

This week’s Product menu – The next four weeks or so are so full of public holidays that many of us will be taking advantage of the short weeks and long weekends. We have some wonderful French delicacies in jars, ready to heat and eat like Cassoulet, Garbure and Chou farci, as well as the delicious pâtés and confit duck. Have a look at them here.

If you can find it in the supermarket, we don't usually stock it, just the products you would struggle to find.... Check our online shop to see more details and prices.

Happy Easter and Passover     We wish you all a very happy Easter and Passover and hope the year to follow will be happy and fruitful and joyous. This is coming to you a little earlier in the week than usual – we anticipate that most of us will be taking a little time off

Angala     We try to go away into our magnificent country areas as often as we can, as the Cape has so much bounty to offer. We stay at really lovely places, but sometimes we go to somewhere so perfect, so beautiful and so peaceful that we never want to leave. Our life is not geared to a pursuit of luxury, but natural beauty and experience are what we love. When we were married, Lynne said to John she didn’t need a 5 star life, just no camping (she is an ex girl guide and back-packed around Europe a lot so camping days are done), but our own bedroom and a bathroom in a clean and neat place would be fine. But we do enjoy a little luxury and spoiling. We love being able to sit outside when we are in the country and not be confined to a room and we love observing nature. Last week we were invited to Angala, a superb boutique hotel nestled under the beautiful Drakenstein mountains in Franschhoek and we found one of those places. Click here to read more.

The Vineyard’s Pinot Festival     Sunday was a sensational day, sunny and just hot enough to require a large sun hat. We were invited by the Vineyard Hotel to come to their Pinot Noir festival and we had a great fun afternoon tasting some of the very best Pinot’s available. Click here to see the photos and learn more

Norma, ‘The First Lady of South African wine’     Norma Ratcliffe came here from Canada in 1971, and married Stanley, a farmer who had decided, in 1964, to grow grapes. She then decided to learn how to make wine and so began the Ratcliffe dynasty. Norma and Warwick wines are celebrating the anniversary on Mother’s Day, 11^th of May. See the details here

Diet? No, change of lifestyle     We have to confess. We are Banting. Lynne took John to a Tim Noakes lecture and he got the message, because the science was explained very clearly by Dr Noakes. Neither of us has high blood pressure, nor are we pre-diabetic, nor are we likely to be. But we do both carry the rotund badge of our profession on the front of us and we would like to do something about reducing it! Is it working? Yes, slowly, and we feel very energetic. We bought the cook book, The Real Meal Revolution, and it has certainly inspired Lynne to try a different approach to food. Neither of us is missing bread or other starches. We do have a very small amount of starch once in a while but that is allowed. Lynne made a good lamb Massaman curry and we decided we would like to have a small half cup of rice with it. Our vegetable and protein intake is up, we still battle to eat fat and oily foods, but Lynne is getting better at hiding these in dishes we love to eat. A large Cajun chicken salad with walnuts and avo can have a thick creamy ranch dressing slavered over it and you don’t notice the huge amount of cream and cheese in it. And we are becoming adept at swiping the protein from the top of canapés. It is probably puzzling to the caterers getting their bases back, but we are certainly not the only ones doing it. Perhaps it will encourage them to think more about these.

THIS WEEK’S RECIPE     You are probably eating special family foods for the holidays so we thought we would give you that Ranch dressing recipe. It is superb. We substituted thick Greek yoghurt the buttermilk which we could not find that day.

Ranch Dressing

50g blue cheese (Gorgonzola is best) – 50g real cream cheese (NO low fat allowed) – 100ml buttermilk – 1 handful of fresh parsley, chopped – 1 small bunch of chives, roughly chopped – salt and pepper – 100ml water

Blend all the ingredients together in a liquidiser or use a stick blender. This keeps well in the fridge and can also be used as a dip with crudités .

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. Karen Glanfield has taken over the UnWined wine appreciation courses from Cathy. See the details here

Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. A calendar of their classes can be seen 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

15th April 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.

Sublime Pinot Noirs at The Vineyard Hotel Pinot Festival

Sunday was a sensational day, sunny and just hot enough to require a large sun hat.  We were invited by the Vineyard Hotel to come to their Pinot Noir festival and we had a great fun afternoon tasting some of the very best Pinots available.

Roy Davies, General Manager of the Vineyard Hotel, welcomes Michael Pownall GM of the Taj. These strange Ps had to be used in tweets. If you tweeted an amusing picture containing this large plastic P you might have won a case of good Pinot Noirs.

The opening at 2 pm and everyone beings to gather

The outdoor restaurant was also very busy with people having lunch

Musicians to entertain us

Hoteliers discussing wine and life

Gordon Newton Johnson and John Collins at their stand. This was our favourite stand of the day, the three Pinot Noirs shown were all superb. And later we got to taste a couple more, including our all time favourite the Windansea which was judged to be the top red wine in John Platter this year

A very nice place to spend a Sunday afternoon

Glen Carlou was also showing very well. The warm afternoon meant the wines all had to be cooled, but it is a lovely drink on such a day

Ebony Sanders and Luhein, the friendly staff from Oak Valley, showed us their Pinots

He just could not resist.  Now if we had had one of those silly plastic P’s we might have stood a chance with our tweet. One of the giant tortoises at the Vineyard admires John’s glass

All the stalls were dotted across the lawn.  Here is Jacqueline Harris from Paul Cluver presenting their Pinots

Gavin Patterson of Sumaridge with his pretty young daughter Amanda

Four Pinot fans Michele Guttler, Dave Swingler, Xenia Oliver and Prof Peter Roos

Jan van Huysteen and Cindy Muller of Gold restaurant and Rickety Bridge in Franschhoek, also enjoying the day

The whole happy tribe: Peter Roos, Paul and Dorothy Windover, Michele Guttler, Dion and Xenia Oliver

John being tweeted by David Wibberley, Food and Beverage Duty Manager at the Vineyard

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2014