Veritas Award winners tasted at the CTICC

Cape Wine Master Bennie Howard, doing his accustomed great job as MC

Marketing managers Righard Theron of De Grendel and Bennie Stipp of DeWetshof

Adre and Hermann Kirschbaum of Buitenverwachting

Margi Hoffe, Anura Vineyards Brand Manager, shows us 2009, 2013 and 2014 vintages of their excellent sauvignon blanc

Natalie Kuhne, Allee Bleue assistant winemaker

 Nederburg White Wine maker Natasha Williams shows us the 1979 Nederburg Edelkeur Chenin blanc Noble Late Harvest

and lets us taste it

Brandon Smit, Madri Dreyer and André Rousseau

It was a very well attended show

High Road consultant wine maker Mark Carmichael-Green with Karin Visser and co-owner Les Sweidan

Saronsberg winemaker Dewalt Heyns

Perdeberg winemaker Riaan Möller discusses their great Chenin blanc with Lynne

KWV winemakers Johann Fourie and Izele van Blerk with Laborie winemaker Kobus van der Merwe with the magnificent 1929 KWV Reserve Port

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2014

Main Ingredient's MENU - The White Room, Elim Festival, Mariana's, Cabo Esperança Wines, Gooey Chocolate Pudding

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An olive thrush in Mariana’s garden, contemplating which of a feast of mulberries he should choose next

In this week’s MENU:

 The White Room at Dear Me

 The Elim Wine & Food Celebration

 Mariana’s in  Stanford

 La Vie en Rose with Kyle’s Cabo Esperança Wines

 This week’s recipe: Gooey Chocolate Pudding

 Important festivals this month

 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 One of the all-time favourite flavours is real vanilla and we have been finding it in various dishes we have tasted recently, including this week’s recipe. We stock some of the world’s best vanilla and other extracts in the Nielsen Massey range.  See them here

A week filled with good food, good friends and even some relaxation by the sea. We have had good and, sadly, some spectacularly bad food over the last couple of weeks. This week it was all good.

The White Room at Dear Me     On Friday night, we visited The White Room at Dear Me, having been invited to taste the Five Course food and wine pairing menu at this Cape Town restaurant, which has just been placed in the Eat Out Top 20 list of best restaurants in South Africa, and is nominated for a place in the top 10. The timing couldn't have been better. Chef Vanessa Marx is over the moon with joy at her nomination and, having tasted the food, we think she deserves it. Two of her dishes really intrigued, amazed and delighted us. Read on

The Elim Wine & Food Celebration     Early on Saturday morning, we picked up our friends and, trusting our GPS, headed off to the wilds near the southern tip of Africa, Cape Agulhas. We have learned, lately, not to trust the GPS implicitly, as this was another occasion when it got its directions horribly wrong and took us on a detour on very bumpy dirt roads. But, when we reached Black Oystercatcher Winery in Elim, we knew that the 3½ hour trip had been worth it. It was a real old fashioned country wine and food festival with the lovely wines of the area and masses of food stalls, music and other entertainment. Given the distance, we were amazed how many people from Cape Town had been attracted to the fiesta. Read on

Mariana’s in  Stanford     After our visit to the Elim Festival, we spent the night at a friend’s daughter’s holiday house in De Kelders, where we had a lovely relaxing evening and morning, reading papers and our books, cooking huge prawns for supper, watching whales and poachers, getting some sun while doing the crossword and then it was time to head over to Stanford, where we had managed to get a reservation for lunch. We have not been for several years, as this small restaurant is amazingly popular (deservedly so) and bookings are hard to get. We were warmly welcomed by Peter Esterhuizen and given a lovely table outside on the vine-covered terrace, facing Mariana’s legendary vegetable garden. Then came the wonderful food. Read On

La Vie en Rose with Kyle’s Cabo Esperança Wines     Kyle Martin has long been a business friend. He used to sell us wine when we had the shop and has remained a personal friend ever since. Recently, he started up his own wine business, Cabo Esperança Wines representing, initially, four good wine producers: Blackwater Wines, Keermont, Oak Valley and Vondeling. His inaugural trade tasting was held at La Vie Café Bar, on the beachfront at Rocklands, on Monday evening and we tasted some really special and two very unusual wines. Read On

This week’s recipe: Gooey Chocolate Pudding

John’s chocolate pudding at Mariana’s was so delicious that Lynne thought she would find you a similar one and this tried and tested recipe comes from Willie Harcourt-Cooze. You do need to use the best dark 70% or 80% chocolate that you can find. The recipe calls for unsalted butter, but all chocolate is improved by the addition of a little salt, so we use ordinary salted butter; you can choose. You might get more than 6 puddings out of this, so have a couple of extra ramekins ready for the overflow. Confusingly, he recommends 6 to 8, but it might depend on the size of your ramekins. You could also use small coffee cups. You make this just before serving, so get all your ingredients ready

180g 70% dark bitter chocolate – 200g unsalted butter – 175g caster sugar – 6 extra large eggs – 2 teaspoon real vanilla extract – 40g ground almonds

Preheat the oven to 160°C. Grease 6 ramekins. Melt the chocolate and butter, with 60g of sugar, in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Do not allow the base of the bowl to touch the water. You could also melt the chocolate in the microwave. In another bowl slightly beat the eggs with the remaining caster sugar and the vanilla extract till pale. Stir the ground almonds into the melted chocolate mix. Then gently fold this mixture into the eggs. Divide between the ramekins and bake for 12 to 15 minutes. The tops will rise and start splitting when they are ready to serve. Serve immediately with thick cream.

You can also add dried fruit soaked in alcohol for a more adult pudding. Brandied cherries would be superb.

Important festivals this month  Robertson’s great annual Wine on the River Festival starts this Friday and ends on Sunday. It is one of the best wine events of the year and we will be there on Sunday. Caroline’s White Wine Review will be at the Table Bay on Tuesday, October 21st. Tickets are in short supply, so book as soon as you can. Durbanville’s Season of Sauvignon takes place on twelve Durbanville farms on Saturday and Sunday, October 25th and 26th.

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, has a variety of courses. 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.

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

16th October 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

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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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Open tasting of the range of Cabo Esperança Wines

La Vie en Rose with Kyle

Kyle Martin has long been a business friend. He used to sell us wine when we had the shop and has remained a personal friend ever since. Recently, he started up his own wine business, Cabo Esperança Wines representing, initially, four good wine producers: Blackwater Wines, Keermont, Oak Valley and Vondeling. His inaugural trade tasting was held at La Vie Café Bar, on the beachfront at Rocklands, on Monday evening and we tasted some really special and two very unusual wines

La Vie put up a good selection of sushi made by their sushi chef as well as some other canapés

Francois Haasbroek talks about his BlackWater wines. He is also consulting at some other wine producers, including Bloemendal in Durbanville

Some interested tasters of his wines. We loved his very different wine made from Bourboulenc grapes, the first to be made in South Africa from this ancient varietal

We met Alex Starey, winemaker at Keermont, Stellenbosch for the first time and tasted the Keermont wines. They are on the same road as De Trafford, to whom they supply grapes, and there is a huge similarity in the intense flavours of these wines; the terroir also shows .  Previously, they exported all their wines, so it is good to see these now available for the local market. Several people were interested in putting them on their lists

Straight from their holiday in Swellendam and then the Elim Festival are Louise and Mark Herd of Sunset Beach Wine & Deli, seen here with Christopher Rawbone-Viljoen of Oak Valley

observed by James Pietersen

Sue Proudfoot of Wine Concepts talks to Jane Eedes on the Vondeling table, while winemaker Matthew Copeland chats to other members of the trade. They had their Methode Ancestral for tasting and it was very popular

Francois Haasbroek with Rian du Plessis of Pick n Pay, Waterfront

A merry band of wine people: Jane Eedes, Kyle Martin, Matthew Coleman and Lynne at the Vondeling table

The Cabo Esperança wine list

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Text and Photographs © John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2014

The Elim Wine & Food Celebration

Early on Saturday morning, we picked up our friends and, trusting our GPS, headed off to the wilds near the southern tip of Africa, Cape Agulhas. We have learned, lately, not to trust the GPS implicitly, as this was another occasion when it got its directions horribly wrong and took us on a detour on very bumpy dirt roads. But, when we reached Black Oystercatcher Winery in Elim, we knew that the 3½ hour trip had been worth it. It was a real old fashioned country wine and food festival with the lovely wines of the area and masses of food stalls, music and other entertainment. Given the distance, we were amazed how many people from Cape Town had been attracted to the fiesta.

Winemakers, brand and sales managers representing the farms at the festival welcomed us

The grapes from Cederberg’s multi award winning wine brand, Ghost Corner, all come from the Elim area. Here are Pieter du Toit and Janine Steyn serving us a selection. The Semillon and the Sauvignon Blanc are very much to our taste, crisp, lean and elegant and full of the flavour of this rocky southernmost terroir in Africa.

We really like the Lomond wines, which we tasted. They have two very good blends, Lomond SSV (Sauvignon, Semillon with a dash of Viognier) and their crisp elegant Snowbush Sauvignon Semillon blend. They have three different Sauvignon Blancs, all delicious, all different. And there are lovely spicy Syrahs. They treated everyone to good smoked salmon and cream cheese crackers

Kobus Gerber pouring a taste for Lynne

Caroline Poulter van Schalkwyk who worked for Strandveld Vineyards for several years was the polished MC for the day . She is now with Steenberg as their Marketing Manager

Caroline with her husband Anthony, who is Marketing Manager at Ken Forrester Wines

Are they twins? We don’t know, but they look like it. The Giant Periwinkle wines are made at Zoetendal by Pierre and Allan Rabie

The Berrio being poured

David Trafford’s farm at Malgas produces the Sijnn wines. They are wines of huge quality and flavour. Sales & Marketing Manager Christine Andrews talks to a fan

Everyone tasting wine and food under one of the large marquees

Simon Harrison of @wine pours his shiraz

Jean Pierre Daneel with his mum Renée on the Jean Daneel stand. They are known for superb Chenin Blancs as well as a great wine, Signature Red, made from Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz. We bought one of our lunch dishes here, a superb jambon persille. We also had very good crisp calamari and chips

Jean Daneel wines chilling in the warm weather

The huge marquee had plenty of occupants

but we found a table for some lunch

Wine cocktails at the Black Oystercatcher bar

Girls always enjoy a chat

Pieter Arno du Toit of Cederberg wines with Elmine Nel of Babylonstoren

A line up of farm tractors to admire

The crowded car park

Sunset at de Kelders at the end of a lovely day

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Text and Photographs © John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2014