Hands on Harvest

Vince and I were married in early September. That means our honeymoon and anniversary trips in France always coincided with wine harvest time. We have seen grape harvests and wine productions all over Europe, toured cellars and tasted the first fruits of the vintage in many Septembers past. But we never actually participated in a harvest hands on.

So this opportunity was particularly sweet. Robertson’s Hands on Harvest Festival. We chose family run Excelsior Winery to do our harvesting. In its 5th generation of wine making, Excelsior is currently run by Peter de Wet.

We spent the evening before the Hands on Harvest in one of Excelsior’s comfortable guest rooms in the historic manor house.

our fellow harvesters

Mosbolletjies

After a early morning stroll through the rose garden, the day started at 8:00 in the Graze café. We were treated to coffee and mosbolletjies, a unique bread made with the yeast of wine must. It was good with a slightly sour dough taste.

owner Peter de Wet

Over coffee and some mosbolletjies, Peter greeted us and explained our day. We were given buckets and secateurs and led down to the field of Cabernet Sauvignon grape vines.

We were encouraged to taste as much as we like as we picked. The grapes are exceedingly sweet. About two and a half times as sweet as the table grapes we are used to.

After our buckets were full, we walked back to the “production site” and poured our grapes into stomping barrels.

First we washed our feet. Then we stomped. Vince and I in the same barrel like that episode of  I Love Lucy in Italy. It felt great! I thought it would stain our skin but it didn’t. The juice was perfectly clear. The barrels have a hole in the bottom which drains the juice back into the bucket. We were given the chance to sample our juice and of course we did.

We could have corked and kept our bottle filled with some of our special stomped juice but Peter warned us it wouldn’t last long like that. It would explode. So we opted out. I shy away from exploding mementos.

mash

Next we all shoveled our left over mash into large troughs which we would squeeze in a vintage wine press.

basket press

Vince on the cellar tour

Of course this is not how Excelsior really makes its wines. After a buffet breakfast, we toured the cellar and saw how it’s really done. Peter told us that Excelsior is the largest exporter of South African wines to America. In fact, he is going to NY next week to meet with his distributors.

winemaker Johan Stemmet

taste and blend

Finally we were given an opportunity to blend and bottle our own wine in Excelsior’s Tasting Room to take away.  The staff had set up miniature barrels of 2014 Merlot, Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon in old-fashioned blending stations. We were allowed to taste and make our own blends. First we could taste some of Excelsior’s blends to get an idea of how the different ratios tasted. Then we could blend our own for a comparative tasting. We settled on 55% Cab, 35% Merlot and 10% Shiraz for our final What's Gnu blend.

put a cork in it and shrink wrap the cork cover

We could even custom design and print our own labels! 

Hippo Birthday to Ewe!

And we will drink our custom blend on our real birthdays in May.

baking homemade roosterkoeks in an outdoor brick oven

After a hard morning (not!) toiling in the fields, we were ready for lunch. One thing we were sure of was that the roosterkoeks were fresh!

winemaking is fun!

We had always regretted not being able to take advantage of an opportunity to participate in a harvest with a winemaker friend of ours in California's Napa and Sonoma Valleys when we had the chance before our move. I think that experience would have been a lot harder than the one we "endured" at Excelsior. Maybe it all worked out for the best.

the lake at Excelsior

the horses of Excelsior

Goats do Roam

In addition to a stellar lineup of wines, Fairview Vineyards near Paarl also produces some incredible cheeses, brie, camembert, bleu and especially the chevres. You can sample them in the restaurant on the vineyard  grounds, the Goatshed, or you can combine your wine tasting with a cheese tasting in a master tasting room where they will pair the wines with the appropriate cheese. The chevre is produced on site side by side with the Fairview, Spice Route, La Capra and, my favorite, the Goats do Roam wine brands.

Vince and I have been big fans of chevre since our honeymoon in France in 1980. We were introduced to French goat cheeses, specifically Saint Maure, in Paris at Tour D'Argent where we sampled some from the cheese cart early in our trip. Love at first bite!

The "moon" in honeymoon stands for a month and we decided to take it literally and after Paris, traveled around France from the Loire Valley to Mont Saint-Michel, down the Atlantic coast to Bordeaux, across to Provence and Burgundy for an entire month. Armed with a suitcase full of Michelin maps (this was before the GPS took the sport and skill out of car travel), Vince drove and I navigated our way through France.

One of the beauties of navigation by maps is that you can see the big picture and survey the entire area as you plan and drive your route. We have had some of our best adventures by going off the beaten path and following detours towards things that attracted our interest on the map. I noticed as we were making our way through the Loire Valley that there was a little town called Saint Maure near the Chateau we were driving to in Chinon. I wondered if that was where the cheese we had tasted after dinner and loved in Paris originated. We decided to take a detour and check it out.

NY Philharmonic in Central Park

We were rewarded with a series of fromageries and goat farms all advertising fresh chevre for sale. We pulled into a farm that looked good following a hand-lettered sign at the top of their driveway that read "fromage de chevre a vendre". We were met and guided by a woman into a goat barn and shown a case filled with chevres wrapped in grape leaves, straw and herbs. Each shelf had a name written on it - Pepe, Gigi, etc. - the names of the goats whose milk was used to make each shelf's selection. And roaming around the farm were the goats themselves with their names identifying them on their neck bells! We sampled a few and took an assortment to eat on our daily picnics for lunch. We liked Pepe's the best!

Lou and Serge like goat cheese too!

For many summers afterwards, chevre was a staple in all the picnics we assembled for the annual NY Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera concerts we enjoyed on blankets in Central Park. Chevre was just starting to become popular in the US in the early 80's. We would buy our chevre at Zabar's on the Upper West Side or Balducci's in the Village before it became commonplace at supermarkets and suburban cheese shops.

Our favorite cheeses at Fairview? The cow's milk Cream Cheeses with Chakalaka, with Black Pepper and with Onion & Chives were delicious as were their Feta and Chevins with Garlic & Herb and Black Pepper & Paprika. The goats do indeed roam at Fairview. And as an added bonus, goat cheese is low in lactose. Since I am lactose-intolerant, this made us both very happy!

Serendipity strikes again at the Uitsig Manor House!

I have a split personality when it comes to travel. On the one hand I am the consummate itinerary planner, going to great lengths to get tickets into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot or into the Steward's Enclosure to watch the Henley Royal Regatta.


 
 

Oberndorf on Christmas Eve

Able to ferret out the details on exactly how one attends the Christmas Eve concert of Silent Night in the chapel where it first debuted in 1818 in Oberndorf, Austria, thereby creating a family Christmas memory to last a lifetime.

But I also always like to leave time in the itinerary for serendipity. And it has given us back rewards in spades. From something as simple as taking a detour to discover the delights of goat cheese fresh from the goat farms amongst the chateaus of the Loire Valley on our honeymoon. Or magically arriving at the exact time every single guided tour was about to start on the private garden tours during the Charleston Garden Club's Annual Private House and Garden Tour. My friend Teri and I wasted absolutely no time waiting for each tour to begin, thereby allowing us to see every garden we wanted to see on our extensive list. “You’re in luck. The tour is just about to start,” they’d say at every house. “Of course it is,” we’d reply.

our ceramic alpine Snow Village collection with the ...

Serendipity has also rewarded us cosmically three times when all the stars and moons aligned for us on two special solstices in England and in Ireland and an equinox in Mexico. 

Silent Night Chapel music box

But sometimes it is even more fortuitous. Like the time we just happened upon a Renaissance Festival getting underway in Honfleur on the Normandy Coast. That afternoon spent learning how to smith swords and daggers, watching a jester’s pantomime and cheering on the descendants of real knights as they jousted and ran the gauntlet - not to mention eating our food with our hands - kept my seven and nine year old sons (and 30 something year old husband!) entertained far better than any day planned at Euro Disney could have done.

Or the time we stumbled upon a poster announcing the medieval Fete de la Saint Jean going on that evening in the alpine village of Megeve where we were staying one summer.






We were able to see a traditional French midsummer's night bonfire lighting in the village square, another ancient practice to celebrate the summer solstice. Megeve is one of the few villages left in France who maintains this practice which was once common all over the country.

The bonfire was followed by a festival where the young couples of the village dressed in traditional Savoie costume and danced traditional reels on stage. The ritual brought us back in time better than any visit to a museum could have done.

Or the long weekend my son Nick and I spent one summer on Mackinac Island after we had dropped my older son Alex off for his summer robotics camp at Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. We had started our trip in Chicago where we saw the launch of the Chicago to Mackinac Yacht Race with friends at the Chicago Yacht Club and we made it to the island just in time to see the winners coming in! Totally unplanned, total serendipity.

But the grand-dipity-daddy of them all was the annual San Ranieri Feast in Pisa, Italy. Vince was working in Switzerland at the time and I was taking our sons on a tour around Italy. The boys and I had been to Venice and Rome already and we were on our way to meet Vince on the Amalfi coast for a few days. We were stopping on the train in Pisa for one night only so that I could show them the Tower and I had innocently booked a hotel giving us a "room with a view" of the Arno. 

As we were checking into our hotel, I started to notice out of the corner of my eye hundreds of votive candles being unpacked by the staff and set up on stairs and fireplace mantles in the lobby. “Oh no,” I thought, “are we preparing for one of the famous Italian strikes?” My mind started a panic stream. No dinner tonight? No blow dryer? No electric power to run the trains for our departure tomorrow to Naples? 

I timidly inquired of the desk manager, “Excuse me. Why are there votive candles? Are you expecting a power outage?” “It is for the feast,” he answered. “What feast?”  I pushed on. “Don’t you know?" he answered quite incredulously, "Tonight is the Feast of San Ranieri and tomorrow is the Regatta!” He didn’t say it, but I could see the words “ … you stunad!” were right on the tip of his tongue!

We were rewarded with an unprecedented view from the hotel rooftop of the Leaning Tower of Pisa  lit up with thousands of little votive candles!

And all the window frames on all the windows of all the buildings lining both sides of the Arno as well as the quaysides themselves.








And we were able to watch the midnight fireworks over the Arno from our hotel "room with a view "windows!

Serendipity jackpot!

I cherish these serendipitous moments even more that those events that come off like clockwork exactly as I had meticulously planned. Those are the result of hard work. These are a gift.

And I am happy to say they just keep on coming.

Serendipity struck again as we picked a great day to visit the wine country in the Constantia Valley. The Constantia Food and Wine Festival was in full swing on the grounds of the Constantia Uitsig Winery. We were able to taste all that the Constantia region had to offer all in one place. And to top it off, it was the 20th Anniversary of the Uitsig Manor House, their fabulous restaurant.

vintner and chef

Tables at the restaurant were of course completely sold out. Some of the diners probably planned and made their reservations last year at this time. But the maître d' took pity on us and he set up a little table for two in the dining room nestled close to the entrance to the front lobby. Okay, actually in the front lobby!

We ate and drank their celebration menu which included Vichyssoise with Seared Atlantic Scallops, Mozzarella Caprese, Wild Mushroom Ravioli, Volcanic Orange Sorbet, Seared Yellow Fin Tuna, Springbok Loin, and Rhubarb Creme Brulee, housemade Turkish Delight and Biscotti with wine pairings which were all exquisite!

Viva La Serendipity!!

South African Wines Part One: We love wine!

One of the draws of moving to South Africa was that it had a wine region we have never visited and always wanted to learn more about. We knew nothing really about South African wines. Most wine stores in the United States carry small selections, if any, and typically not the best representatives. Since we have been here we have discovered that the wines in South Africa are extremely good, a tremendous value and as we suspected, not widely distributed in the US.

Vince and I have always been into wine, even before we were married, and we have always tried to visit wine regions wherever we traveled. First of all you meet the nicest people. You get an insider’s view into an interesting part of the local culture and wine makes a great souvenir! 

Part of our honeymoon was spent in the Loire Valley, Bordeaux and the Burgundy regions of France where we went for tastings at all the first-growth chateaus and many of the smaller appellations. We brought back a case of 1978 Chateau Haut-Brion from that trip transporting it by car from Bordeaux to Normandy, by hovercraft across the Channel, by train to London and finally a taxi to Heathrow for our flight home to JFK! At that time we were able to carry the case on board the plane and place it in the overhead. My, how things have changed.

10th wedding anniversary in Burgundy

We purchased the case directly from the negociant, Nathaniel Johnston et Fils, one of the oldest firms (established 1734)  in France, on the Quay in Bordeaux, where we spent a pleasant afternoon while Monsieur Johnston and one of his fils regaled us with stories about Bordeaux from Napolean’s time through the occupation by Hitler’s army. I remember one story in particular. He told us that Hitler was so confident Germany would be victorious over the French, he had the first growths strictly guarded by the Gestapo for after the war. Had Hitler been less confident, he may have destroyed this precious region. 

Another story centered around Raoul Blondin, the Chateau Mouton Rothschild Cellarmaster at the time we visited. We had just met Raoul the day before when he led us on a tour of the cellar at Mouton. As a very young man, Raoul was apprentice to his father who was Mouton’s Cellarmaster during the Vichy Occupation. Nathaniel Johnston told us how a then 21 year old Raoul had once stood up to a Nazi General who decided to pillage some of the cellar right under the nose of the Gestapo while his father the Cellarmaster was away. Raoul survived the incident, but the General probably did not having been summarily sent to the Russian Front after being forced to return his truck full of cases back to Mouton. See? Where else would you get that story?

Hunter Valley Australia

Our honeymoon was the first of many wine-centric trips. Over the years, we have visited all the wine regions of France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Greece, sampled Port and Vinho Verde in Portugal, and Riojas in Spain. We even tasted wine cultivated in Suffolk and the Chiltern Valley in England (yes, they produce wine in England but trust me, you are better off sticking to beer and whiskey.) Beyond Europe, we tasted Shiraz in Australia’s Hunter Valley, Malbecs in Mendoza, Argentina, Ice Wine in Quebec, kosher wine in Israel's Golan Heights and back home have extensively visited the wine regions of California and the Pacific Northwest in America.  And with every tasting and vineyard visit, our conclusion was the same.  If you want to taste and buy the best wines an area produces, you must go to the region or country itself and many times to the source vineyard!

So this weekend we are going to take our first drive to some of the wine routes around Cape Town to begin our study of South African wines. To prepare, we have been going to tastings at the local wine store and taking notes on vineyards and vintners we want to visit. We bought Platter’s South African Wines 2013 which is the most comprehensive guide to the wine regions of South Africa you can get. The annual “orange book,” Platter’s is akin to our Parker wine ratings or Zagat guides for food. We have set up a wine cellar in our dining room using vintage wooden Stellenbosch wine crates we purchased at Bootleggers in Fourways. There is room for two cases with drawer and cabinet space in the credenza below for more. We are armed and ready!

To be continued ....