There is lots to experience and taste at the Franschhoek Uncorked Festival each year. Visit estates and meet the winemakers, writes DAWN KENNEDY.
TAKE a breathtakingly beautiful valley, combine it with the opportunity to taste new releases from world class wine estates and you have an unrivalled opportunity for pleasure. It’s affordable too: R120 (or R80 if you score on Groupon) grants you access to the Franschhoek Uncorked Festival.
Our perception of the good life is as individual as a thumbprint. Some crave the sound of surf, others want a hawk’s eye view of the world, perched on a mountaintop. But for a large proportion life can’t get better than being a winemaker in the Franschhoek valley. Uncorked offers not only the chance to premier wine but a unique glimpse into Franschoeks’s magnificent wine estates, replete with wealth and good taste.
Going to the Uncorked Festival is like going on holiday. Some people approach the event like tourists. Armed with a map they determine to visit as many farms as possible and taste every varietal until they fall in an exhausted wine soaked heap on Sunday. Others approach the festival like birdwatchers, creating lists of wine farms that they tick off and compulsively compare with others.
Thankfully, my companion, Cara Lee Dely and I were of a like mind. We would approach the experience as seasoned travellers. Ignoring the map and shunning the touted “must-sees”, we would take the road less travelled.
With a nearby town full of students, the opportunity to taste unlimited wine for an entire weekend is a recipe for Bacchanalia. Saturday at Uncorked is a renowned party; its epicenter is at Boekenhoutskloof estate where the wine is on tap. It’s rumoured that over 800 bottles of their Chocolate Block, which has a cult like following of fans, were consumed this year.
Thankfully, by Sunday, the festival had been uncorked for 24 hours and had plenty of time to breathe. We met a group of ladies, clutching wine bottles, dancing barefoot and determined to make Sunday swing, but they didn’t dent the sedate and genteel vibe.
Cara is the assistant wine maker at Môreson. As she swivels, sniffs and sips the Protea range at Antonij Rupert Wines, where we start our journey, she tells me about her circuitous route to wine making. After studying photography in Stellenbosch, she decided that she didn’t want to click shutters for a living and, in 2013, took an arbitrary job as a general assistant at Packwood, a small boutique winery on the Garden Route. During the harvest season they needed extra hands in the cellar and that’s when Cara found her calling. “There’s a smell in the cellar that you’ll never be able to replicate: fresh, fruity, vibrant and yeasty. It’s very sacred,” she says.
It’s before lunch time and only a small group of people are gathered together in the tasting room. The atmosphere is subdued, that awkward time before the party gets warmed up. Thankfully, the jovial Thabo Hermanus who remembered Cara from a wine tasting event, breaks the silence. At Uncorked, the conversation gambit is predictably, “Which wineries will you visit this year?” Like ourselves, Thabo has picked five wine farms that he plans to visit. It’s his first Uncorked Festival. “I like my wine and i like learning about it,” he says.
Starting any day (ok, maybe not a Monday) with champagne and oysters is auspicious and we indulged in oysters paired with L’Ormarins Cap Classique wine. Franschhoek is famed for it’s sparkling wines and has the only Cap Classique Route in South Africa.
The highlight of my day was the Black Elephant Vintners. Owners of this boutique wine farm and winemakers, Kevin Swart, Jacques Wentzel and Raymond Ndlovu’s stated aim is to “demystify wines” and offer “wine experiences without the pomp and ceremony commonly associated with the industry”. They offered the most original pairing – cake and wine. This unusual taste collaboration was concocted together with Lisa Adams-Waite, a graduate of Cape Town’s Silwood School of Cookery. Their Vintners Brut MCC paired fabulously and unexpectedly with lemon twist macaroons. I found the Pinotage, paired with milk tart pairing, exceptional. Kevin explained that “The idea is to reframe peoples’ thinking, to take them out of their comfort zones.”
The vibe at Black Elephant was terrific. Ryan Smith of Ryan’s Kitchen’s was manning the braai. The husky Janis Joplin like sounds of the singer from Ozone filled the intimate al fresco style space.
Then it was on to Leopards Leap. As a wildlife lover I support this estate because of their association with the Cape Leopard Trust, an NGO dedicated to conserving the endangered Cape Mountain Leopard. But I find the aesthetic intimidatingly impersonal. The spacious glass architecture, combined with wine-flushed cheeks, left me feeling like a ripened tomato in a greenhouse. “We had over 1,200 people here yesterday,” a staff member informed us as he whizzed past, looking like he’d survived an onslaught.
After the modernism of Leopards Leap I craved tradition. Boschendal founded in 1685, is one of the regions oldest wine farms. With its ample lawn, statuesque oak tree and seventeenth century Cape Dutch manor the farm oozes history and was an idyllic way to end a perfect day.
The Western Cape is inundated with wine festivals, but Uncorked gets my ribbon. Why huddle in a tent tasting wine, or even worse, jostle inside a cramped and impersonal conference hall, when uncorked offers the chance to visit farms that are often by appointment only and meet and chat with winemakers about their craft on their own turf.
There were lots of places I didn’t get to visit. People with cute paws embossed on their cheeks spoke highly of their experience of Four Paws. But that’s the point. Always leave something undiscovered, something to return for.
l Franschhoek Wine Valley: 021 876 2861, www.franschhoek uncorked.co.za