Groote Post Country Market

We have friends here from the Netherlands and took them to this lovely country market on Sunday. It is held on the last Sunday of every month and we had a great time. The market is full of things to buy, things to eat and things to admire. There are lots of food trucks and of course you can taste and buy the excellent Groote Post wines to enjoy with your lunch or take home with you

The market is on a field next to the wine cellar and is arranged in a rectangle. There is no entry fee and there is plenty of parking

Ah! Refreshing and good Darling Beer on a very hot day is lovely too

They also have many places to sit and enjoy the day, under the trees and some umbrellas

Coffee machines and pizza ovens

and things for the children to do while you shop

It keeps them busy for hours. This young man was very adept

Wines for tasting inside the lovely cool cellar and tasting room

Such friendly staff help you taste the wine

Books for sale

People enjoying some shade and some refreshment

Some real traditional South African pickles and preserves

Clothing, baskets, pottery

Lynne thought she was back in the 60s, a stall with tie dye clothing! It was next to a stand selling silver jewellery

Lovely handmade wooden toys with an eager customer

Another jewellery stand

Beads, clothing, wooden items made from recycled wood

Superb organic honey from Darling, jams and creamy Darling toffee; a Crèpe stand and a family relaxing

Cool under the spreading pepper tree

We had our lunch from this stand: Lynne, an enormous portion of salted spare ribs with coleslaw and John a pulled pork sandwich. Groote Post gave us vouchers for lunch and a bottle of their cracking Rosé made from Pinot Noir. It is only available from the farm. Our Dutch friends liked it so much they bought a box to go home with them

We agree!

Sales were fast and furious

You can take tractor rides around the farm

We managed to get a table under this huge pepper tree

We also tasted the two ciders made by winemaker Lukas Wentzel, one with pomegranate juice added

Lukas Wentzel, the Groote Post winemaker, seen here with his wife, Tersia. Lukas, who is in the middle of a busy harvest, very generously gave us a tank tasting of his new Chenin blanc, Sauvignon blanc and Pinot noir

Their son is one of those fast growing hungry teens!

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2017

GetWine Saturday sale

Where do you buy your wine? Your local supermarket? Direct from the wine farms? On-line or specialist wine shops? We buy from all these sources. Get Wine in Woodstock who sell wine in vast quantities, often discounted, is one of the places we include on our places to buy as they often do a two day special with about 28 wines, all of which you can taste. They also hold these tastings in other areas. You need to watch for them on their web site. We won't buy wine unless we have tasted it (and love it), so these tastings suit us down to the ground. We went to one held at their Woodstock premises on Saturday morning. And yes, we did come home with three cases

The shop is in the PALS Building basement, 95 Durham Avenue in Salt River

Wine piled high. Many of the wines are at farm prices; they may be older vintages that the farms want to move because they are from vintages of 2 or 3 years past. We have always said our SA white wines deserve a little time, so this is the place to find them. And most red wine improves with age

Wander down the corridors looking for your favourite farms to see if they have wines you like. You can buy one bottle or many, mixed cases too, export returns, and bin end unlabelled bottles

The tasting taking place at the end of the shop. This time there were 28 wines to taste. One good MCC Brut from Kleine Zalze at R89 (we bought), 12 well known white dry wines: Chenin, Sauvignon Blanc Chardonnay and a respectable Viognier from Richard Hilton. A Secateurs Rosé from Adi Badenhorst and 14 red wines: Cabernet, Merlot ,Shiraz, Pinotage, Pinot noir and blends.

Lynne does a speedy tasting of them all, John is more leisured, picking and choosing, in between taking photographs

It is a nicely varied crowd

The wines are popular and the prices are reasonable. The whites went from R25 to R95 a bottle and the Reds from R30 to R129

Friedrich, Sales Manager from La Vierge tempted us with their Pinot Noir which we bought. R95 a bottle

The Get Wine crew with the three Wegner brothers. John says that Susan and Louis need to complete the corporate look and copy the Wegner brothers' "hairdo"

Marking up our order forms. They also have pre-selected Everyday mixed cases of wine: 12 bottles for R399 and pre-selected Value mixed cases R549 for 12 bottles if you can't make up your mind or can't or don't have time to taste

Johan Wegner’s daughter Tia presented a tasting of Clemingold's Gin. Lots of citrus flavours

Some serious tasters

And red hot tills, with lots of helpful staff to collate your order and help you to your car. Check out their web site and get on their mailing list to see when the next tasting is going to be. Or just visit to browse. www.getwine.co.za

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2017

Breakfast at Baked, Regent Road, Sea Point

We write reviews of all sorts of restaurants, but we have to confess that we usually prefer to have breakfast at home. We start the day very simply with fresh fruit and green tea for Lynne and muesli and black coffee for John. He makes the breakfast every day. There is a sudden bloom of restaurants doing breakfast that people keep telling us about, so we have decided to try a few of them. This week was the turn of Baked, which is near the circle at the end of Sea Point, next to President Motors. Virtuously, we walked there and arrived just before 9 am

The outside of the restaurant. It was in Bakoven until December, when they moved to Sea Point

The bread on sale looks good, especially the croissants

The breakfast menu. Those laminated menus are rather old and tatty with turned down corners. They look a bit unsanitary and probably need replacing

An eclectic selection of furniture with some of the tables made from recycled cable reels

Our Americanos came with a glass of water. The water is flavoured with cucumber, not to our taste but you can ask for tap water. It is trendy to have those thick cups, but we would love something a bit thinner. However we do understand that they are not easy to break when washing, so that is why most coffee places use them. We like the bright colour

The eggs Benedict was not bad. R73 a portion, two slices of bread and two poached eggs topped with ham and Hollandaise. Strangely, they add beetroot juice to the Hollandaise sauce. Doesn't alter the taste much, which is good and it is not too acidic (as it often is in SA). The egg yolks were only just runny, sadly, although we did ask for the whites to be cooked but the yolks to be runny. The Prosciutto ham was superb, tasted imported and the bread was a revelation. It was hard to cut through the crust (blunt knife?), but it had a very good “crunch”, and the centre melted in the mouth. A good, well salted, crisp crust ciabatta, worth taking home

Baked Eggs and Brioche - R68. Actually, well cooked scrambled eggs on a lovely soft and buttery brioche roll. Layered with aged Gruyère cheese and a slice of tomato. No chives, as had been promised in the menu, but a couple of leaves of rocket which, like much local rocket, lacked pepperiness. We opted to add the good crisp pancetta topping at an extra R25, which brought it to R93. Both portions were generous and satisfying

Our bill. We might return and try the freshly made juices and the croissants. It was not busy on a Thursday morning, but more people did arrive as we left. There is also a small but good-looking lunch menu. The waiters were helpful and smiling. They have a security guard outside whom we thought was a local gangster! The waiters set us right

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2017

This week's MENU. Sand mining in the Swartland; Celebrating the Jordan Harvest; Harvest celebration at Muratie; MOK gallery on Muratie; This week's recipe. Rich Chocolate Ice-Cream; MENU’s Wine of the week. Muratie's Isabella Chardonnay

A honey bee harvesting from a pickerel weed flower in our pond (Pontederia cordata; jongsnoekkruid)

The shutter speed was 1/1250 of a second and the bee's wings are still a blur!

•      Sign the petition! Stop sand mining in the Swartland
•      Celebrating the Harvest at Jordan
•      A relaxed Harvest celebration at Muratie
•      The new MOK gallery on Muratie
•      This week's recipe on our MENU Rich Chocolate Ice-Cream
•      MENU’s Wine of the week. Muratie's Isabella Chardonnay

This is a lovely time of the year, but it is never complete bliss. We love the sunshine, but we long for the drenching rain our friends in the north of the country are having, even if it is a bit excessive at times. We have enough water in our dams to last about four months if we are careful. It should start raining by May, but we need to be very careful. Of course, this being harvet time in the wine industry, we need dry weather until the grapes have come into the cellars. It seems to be a very good harvest, down on quantity, but beautiful quality, so it should be a good vintage.

Sign the petition! Stop sand mining in the Swartland   The South African wine community is in a state of shock. An application for sand mining rights in the Paardeberg area of the Swartland has been approved by the Malmesbury municipality. An appeal against this decision is in progress. If it is allowed to go ahead, some of the country's best wine producers will be very badly affected, if not ruined. These include Eben Sadie, the Mullineuxs, Adi Badenhorst, Vondeling, David and Nadia and Lammershoek. PLEASE go to http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protect-the-paardeberg and sign the petition against this travesty

Celebrating the Harvest at Jordan  Glorious summer brings on the grape harvest in our winelands and many farms are celebrating their success. We hear that this harvest is generally a good one, despite the drought; grapes are smaller but the juice is very concentrated, with good sugar and acids. We were invited to Jordan this week with other media people to taste some of the juice, the newly fermenting wine and last year's bottled wine and we were very impressed

A relaxed Harvest celebration at Muratie   Muratie opens its doors each year for the Harvest celebration and hosts a relaxed day in the garden with food, good music, lots of wine and fun. We saw the new Art Gallery, passed on the opportunity to stomp some grapes (much enjoyed by the youngsters), tasted their new fermenting wines, took a tractor ride through the vineyards and chilled under the trees with a huge box full of grapes, figs, cheese, bread and other delights, accompanied by their wines. It was "Cool bananas" as the chilled Capetonians say

The new MOK art gallery on Muratie  MOK is run by a relative of Rijk Melck, Cecile Blevi. Rijk took us to have a look and we were very impressed. It is in an historic old house on the properly, where freed slave Ansela van de Kaap lived with her German husband Lourens Campher, the first owner of Muratie from 1695

This week's recipe on our MENU   We know that many of you loved the simple strawberry ice cream Lynne published a while ago. Now for another decadent ice cream. Masterchef Australia has been full of ice creams, parfaits and mousses this year and they made them look very complex, especially when chocolate was involved. It is not

Rich Chocolate Ice-Cream

75g caster sugar - 4 egg yolks - 600 ml single cream - 1 Vanilla Pod, split open - 200g plain 70% dark chocolate

Put the sugar with 6 tablespoons of water in a small pan and heat gently until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to the boil and continue boiling until the sugar reaches the thread stage* – about 110º C. Beat the yolks in a mixing bowl, then pour in the syrup in a thin stream, whisking all the time

Put the cream, vanilla pod and chocolate, broken into small pieces into a pan over a low heat and stir till the chocolate has melted. Take it up to just below boiling point. Remove the vanilla pod and pour the scalding chocolate cream onto the egg mixture, whisking until it is thoroughly mixed. Pass through a sieve. It should resemble a light custard in texture. Cool and freeze for 24 hours. You can use an ice-cream machine if you have one.

[*Thread stage for sugar is when you drop a bit of the mix into a cold glass of water, the syrup will form a loose thin thread]

MENU’s Wine of the week. Muratie's Isabella Chardonnay is luscious, with white peaches, citrus and gentle caramel, and a nice clean, dry finish. The new fermenting juice we tasted from this year's harvest has fresh nectarines & apricots in abundance, with a hint of pine nuts. It points to another lovely wine from the 2017 harvest. Winemaker Hattingh de Villiers showed us the new wine fermenting in the cellar. It sells for R145 on the farm or on line, and is also available at good wine retailers. It is drinking well now but, if you can keep it for a couple of years, it is bound to become even better. Platter awarded the 2016 vintage 4½ stars

21st February 2017

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

If you like the photographs you see in our publications, please look at our Adamastor Photo website for our rate card and samples from our portfolio

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. 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. 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.

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This week's recipe on our MENU: Rich Chocolate Ice-Cream

We know that many of you loved the simple strawberry ice cream Lynne published a while ago. Now for another decadent ice cream. Masterchef Australia has been full of ice creams, parfaits and mousses this year and they made them look very complex, especially when chocolate was involved. It is not

Rich Chocolate Ice-Cream

75g caster sugar - 4 egg yolks - 600 ml single cream - 1 Vanilla Pod, split open - 200g plain 70% dark chocolate

Put the sugar with 6 tablespoons of water in a small pan and heat gently until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to the boil and continue boiling until the sugar reaches the thread stage* – about 110º C. Beat the yolks in a mixing bowl, then pour in the syrup in a thin stream, whisking all the time.

Put the cream, vanilla pod and chocolate, broken into small pieces into a pan over a low heat  and stir till the chocolate has melted. Take it up to just below boiling point.  Remove the vanilla pod and pour the scalding chocolate cream onto the egg mixture, whisking until it is thoroughly mixed.  Pass through a sieve. It should resemble a light custard in texture.  Cool and freeze for 24 hours. You can use an ice-cream machine if you have one.

[*Thread stage for sugar is when you drop a bit of the mix into a cold glass of water,  the syrup will form a loose thin thread]

MENU's Wine of the Week: Muratie Isabella Chardonnay 2016

Muratie's Isabella Chardonnay is luscious, with white peaches, citrus and gentle caramel, and a nice clean, dry finish. The new fermenting juice we tasted from this year's harvest has fresh nectarines & apricots in abundance, with a hint of pine nuts. It points to another lovely wine from the 2017 harvest

Winemaker Hattingh de Villiers showed us the new wine fermenting in the cellar. It sells for R145 on the farm or on line, and is also available at good wine retailers. It is drinking well now but, if you can keep it for a couple of years, it is bound to become even better. Platter awarded this vintage 4½ stars

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2017