EatingOut With Dusty Miller: A day in the (Cape) country!

Standard People
By Dusty Miller   It’s amazing how coincidences occur these days.

A fortnight ago, on the Thursday, to the best of my recollection I’d never heard of Solms-Delta wines; but at a private dinner party at the sparkling, swish new Taj Hotel in Cape Town (the former Reserve Bank of South Africa head office) my rather jaded taste buds went into overdrive on sampling their Cape Jazz Shiraz, accompanying some first-rate Indian food.

I was in South Africa as a guest of Brands South Africa, the only Zimbo journalist to be invited on a familiarisation tour with 16 other hacks: six from India, two from Russia, two Brazilians an Egyptian, a Zambian, the rest from Kenya and West Africa.

Forget the usual Shiraz (or Syrah) a powerful, robust red wine I’ve long favoured with curry, piri-piri and other strongly flavoured, highly spiced foods. This is a light, bubbly, sparkling, refreshing rose (dare I say champagne-style?) wine. Non-vintage, low in alcohol, infused with a subtle fruity sweetness, it could be enjoyed all day at braais, on the beach or at Kariba.

It will be an instant hit with lovely ladies who lunch languidly and costs only R58 at the farm as opposed to the label’s more conventional Africana Shiraz (2005) which will knock you back R385 a bottle.

Mind you that’s by far the firm’s dearest product: this flagship wine is made from Shiraz grapes desiccated on the vine. A dark-deep-red champion wine with a floral nose, noble bitterness and intense tannin on the palate, it earns 4,5 stars from Platter.

The day after I first sampled Solms-Delta’s excellent enological products, I was on their magnificent vineyard 15km from Franschhoek in the Western Cape Winelands, where sun-blessed vines thrive under a cornflower-azure sky and magnificent rugged purple-blue panorama of the Drakenstein Mountains.

It was a stark, sylvan, contrast to a morning visit to the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station on the coast and a quick stare at South Africa’s rather wee first wind-powered generators. (The one a few clicks from my daughter’s Oxfordshire home on the former RAF Watchfield looked 10 times bigger!)And coincidence continued, as, when I arrived back at graft the following Sunday, the first e-mail opened of 739 which arrived during five days in RSA, was from blue@2 Private Wine Bar, inviting me to a tasting of Solms-Delta labels, lead by the vineyard’s head winemaker-cum-consultant, Hiko Hegewisch, whom I sat opposite at lunch 2 185 km away two days earlier!

Sadly, the tyranny of newspaper deadlines meant I couldn’t make the blue@2 event; a pity because it’s run by Danielle Hartmann, a vivacious ash-blonde (sometimes!) former farm girl from Doma. A qualified, but lost, photo-journalist by trade, she’s run the wine bar a few years.

Solms-Delta is worth a trip by Zimbabweans visiting the Fairest Cape. The 320-year-old property is now not so much a wine farm, as a successful social experiment. Partners Mark Solms, whose family has been on that bit of real estate for generations and Richard Astor of THE Astors (think the Waldorf-Astoria and newspaper publishing clan) have a third share apiece, as do the workers and their families, through the Wijn de Caab Trust.

We were there for an alfresco wine-tasting, tour of the sculptured, rolling lands, a visit to the museum — rich in the history of slavery and Apartheid —and a memorably magnificent lunch served on a shady stoep under classical Cape-Dutch gables, serenaded by the farm’s dulcet-voiced choir, mainly comprising so-called Coloured women.

We’d heard in Pretoria about the proposed introduction of a South African National Insurance/National Health scheme which could take 14 years to launch, but Solms-Delta (the vineyard is in a delta between two attractive meandering rivers) already has a mini-welfare state scheme in operation.I’m afraid I was very lazy. When I saw what I thought was the menu for our late lunch I shoved it in a lap-top backpack with the Brands South Africa logo we’d been given. Digging it out a week later, to write this, the Heritage Menu bears no resemblance to the photographs I took!

We had a cream of vegetable soup with croutons, a superbly fresh kingklip dish (or rump steak) and a pud which featured crème brulee topped with an enormous strawberry, ice-cream and a koeksuster.

The printed menu (minimum six covers; cost R165) offers, as starters, waterblommetjie soup served with Khoe-khoen breads flavoured with indigenous Khoen herbs; snoeksambal (fish) served with moskonfyt (grape syrup) and farm bread or Cape fresh fruit cup with a dash of Solms-Delta Koloni  (dessert wine).

Mains: vegetarian veldt vegetables and goats’ cheese bake with wild mustard sauce; Masala  chicken curry, served with almond basmati rice and traditional fruit and veg sambals of the Cape Malay slaves or venison pie with begrafnirys (funeral rice), quince jelly and cooked dried peachesSweet: Buchu mould with wild berry jam and syrup; Boeber (a flavourful milk pudding) with date biscuits or small Dutch pancakes served with Solms-Delta Gemoedsrus port-style sauce and berry custard.

If you can’t afford a trek to die Kaap, just yet, you can now buy Solms-Delta wines in Zimbabwe.

Tarryn Crundall of Havergal Marketing has the agency ([email protected]); she says they are available at attractive prices at Spar Borrowdale Village and Arundel, Veg&Vine Borrowdale and—of course—blue@2, 2 , Aberdeen Road, Avondale.

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