Day 10 – Exploring the Wine lands

Today was a busy day as it was ram-packed with stops and sights. The first was the beautiful university town of Stellenbosch. There were plenty of delightful shops here that made me wish that we could’ve had longer to wander around the pretty streets and boutiques. However, I did buy a sleek ebony elephant and treated myself to some chocolates at the local chocolatier.

The area was also very quirky and artistic – street art littered most pavements - varying from roman-looking statues to more contemporary pieces (like the one bellow):

Before we arrived at our next stop, we visited Victor Verster prison. On 11th February, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from here after 27-and-a-half years of imprisonment in the fight for equality. This was perhaps one of the most emotional landmarks in the whole country and certainly of our trip.

 

We then went further into the mountains to the little town of Franschhoek. It was a very picturesque settlement which had an abundant amount of galleries, boutiques and a small market area. We went for lunch at the Franschhoek Pancake Café.

I had a gorgeous pancake stuffed with cream cheese and smoked salmon that combined nicely with a good squeeze of lemon juice.

After this fulfilling lunch we continued on to the Boschendal wine estate – the second oldest in the region.

 

Situated in the heart of their wine lands, we were shown all the processes in creating their distinctive wine. First the grapes are picked by hand and are loaded into this vast steel container where the grapes are separated from the twigs and leaves.

They then have their pips removed and are put into huge stainless steel vats at varying temperatures with the skins on – this infuses the juice with more flavour and colour.

The wine is then pumped into oak barrels to mature. Each barrel can hold up to 300 litres of wine.

We were then escorted to our wine tasting.

We were each given 5 different wines – 2 whites, what looked like rosé and 2 reds. I always prefer white anyway but the red was enjoyable too (I won’t bother making up a load of pretentious nonsense). The rosé-coloured wine was in fact one of Boschendal’s specialities – white wine made with red grapes. In order to do this they cook red grapes with the skins on for only two hours before removing them to continue making the wine rather than leaving them on for the whole process to get the deep, rich colour of red wine.

Overall, the day was a beautiful success and we finished back at the hotel for a Cape Malay buffet (a variety of homemade special curries and stews that are a combination of different settlers’ cuisine that came to Cape Town in the 17^th-19^th centuries) - it was delicious!