Haute Cabrière
We stopped here after our meal at La Petite Ferme. This Franchhoek winery is known for sparkling wines. We had a cellar tour as well as a tasting.
Their most interesting bubbly was a pink one – the Bella Rosa – which is a chardonnay with a hint of pinot noir. We bought a bottle and drank it when we were at our guest house in Cape Town...
From the bottle:
In vino veritas
Lurking in every glass
Of our Chardonnay Pinot Noir
Is Bacchus and reality
Mingling
Sun, soil, vine, man
In a delicious manner
To celebrate life
And our dreams.
- Achim von Arnim
Groot Constantia
We came here after a trip to Table Mountain; it was along the way to a restaurant where we were planning on having dinner. Tasting had already closed for the day when we got there, but there was a group there and the lady in charge let us in anyway, and we didn't have to pay anything for the tasting, even though we offered. That was really nice of her! So we got to taste a few red and dessert wines. And it's a good thing the lady let us taste, because we ended up buying a bottle of their wonderful cab sauv ;-)
Raka
We were on our way to Betty's Bay when we drove by Raka... and then turned around to check it out. We did so because we drank a Raka Shiraz a few days earlier (see tasting notes), loved it, and were therefore curious about what else they had. When we arrived, we entered the main building, and nobody was there. We thought this was kind of strange, as there were wine bottles and tasting glasses set up at a table. We called out “hello...” and nobody showed up. OK...fine. (And very strange that we could just walk into a place like that.) We turned and walked out. As we were leaving, we heard a voice call out to us and saw a woman run out of a house nearby. When we met, she mumbled something about how typical it was that the moment she went to the house to take care of some laundry, people would show up...
Anyway, we told her about the wine we had (biography shiraz), which was why we stopped at Raka at all. She immediately poured us the 2003 version of the wine... DANG! The 2004 was quite good, but this... this was great! We also got to try lots of other good stuff, including good stuff that she tapped from the tanks :-)
We didn't buy anything though... hmmf... next time ;-)
This woman, Elna, was very interesting. Although she had knowledge about wine, she wasn't much of a wine drinker. It was fun talking to her. We could have talked all night, had we not been on our way to Betty's Bay to see the penguins ;-)
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