Wine Country
Posted: 2/27/2005 11:30 PM (Permalink)
South Africa has a very proud tradition of wine making, a fact that you get reminded of almost everywhere you go as a tourist. Well, wine is good so we booked two nights in Stellenbosch, the heart of the wine country.
We had one more long day of driving through some seriously empty sections of country to get to Stellenbosch. It was reminiscent of eastern Oregon or perhaps the desert Southwest in the US. The last 300 km or so was along the N1. This is the major highway between Cape Town and Johannesburg. There was lots of truck traffic and it was two lane the entire way. The guide books (not to mention signs along the road) say that this is a very dangerous stretch of road because of the trucks because it is long, straight and monotonous. I liked it though.
Eventually, you hit the southern mountain range and go through a tunnel. On the other side the temperature is noticeably cooler and the land is much more fruitful (ha ha, pun!). We reached Stellenbosch in the afternoon.
Stellenbosch is the second oldest town in the country after Cape Town. It was originally set up by the Dutch East India country as a place to grow provisions for ships passing through. Not surprisingly then, the city has a Dutch colonial architecture. It is also the home of a university so it had a distinct college town feel to it.
The number of wineries in the area is staggering. I went on a wine tour in California a few years ago so that is the only thing I can compare it to. To give you an idea, we went out on Sunday. Only a small fraction of the wineries in the area are open on Sunday, and we went to only a small fraction of those. Finally, Stellenbosch is only one of the wine towns. There are a couple of other towns in the wine region. Of course, touring wineries isn’t something you rush through so we weren’t expecting to drink a lot of wine. We stopped at the following wineries:
I won’t pretend to have anything to say about the quality of the wines. I don’t have the most sophisticated of palates. One thing Stellenbosch has on Sonoma is the scenery is a whole lot prettier.
I probably liked the wine at Delaire the best, the Neethlingshof was the prettiest setting, but I wanted to point out Spier because it was quite a bit more than just a winery. It was more like wine related amusement park. They had a little petting zoo, a crafts bazaar, a conference center and lots of restaurants including a deli where you could put together a picnic lunch (that’s what we did). Just take a look at this sprawling complex. There were a lot of people there on a Sunday afternoon.
We went to a couple of really nice restaurants in Stellenbosch. As you might expect, the wine is really great, but it’s also cheap and they give you a lot of it when you order by the glass.
Our second night in Stellenbosch was our last night in South Africa. We had one more day in Cape Town and then a long ride back to the US. I’ll leave with another picture of the wine country.