handtomouth

Been a torrid time, but with some good results, the best being a wonderful launch of Flagstone’s La Bascula wines at Pete Goffe-Wood’s place at the Waterfront. La Bascula is a joint venture: some South Africans going to Spain to make wine. The results are good and well priced for the quality (around R80-R100) so look out for them.

Pete’s food on the night was the highlight though, he cooked up a fiesta of Spanish flavours, including a wicked paella and churros con chocolate. The ingredients were the real thing and he also had some fine Spanish salts on the table, smoked and infused with spice. The evening rounded out with a tasting of some specialist vinegars, including a Cava vinegar that was easily sippable and a Pedro Ximinez of monstrous proportions.

It’s a shame this guy does not cook in his own restaurant (he consults) but he has just (and still is I think) involved in the new restaurant at the Ambassador Hotel. I’m heading over soon.

Always one of the memorable events on the wine writer’s calendar is the launch of the new John Platter Wine Guide, not only for seeing the who’s who in the industry at the function, but more importantly for the opportunity to taste the wines that have been awarded the full five star bonanza.

As ever, the guide has grown, with an incredible 800-odd new wines racked up on customers’ shelves in the last year. If you or I become acquainted with 100 of these that will be a remarkable feat, as for the other 700… Continue reading ‘John Platter Wine Guide 2007′

Last Sunday a great afternoon spent tasting and gabbing pinot. Gordon Newton Johnson makes one at Newton Johnson cellars, and he wanted to have some friends around to compare a group that ranged from Marlborough to Hemel-en-Aarde to the Cote de Nuits. Continue reading ‘Desire and Satisfaction’

Also launched this week is the new edition of the John Platter South African Wine Guide. As ever, it has grown, and I’ll write a fuller report of some interesting points regarding our “wine bible” later. The team has also identified their wine of the year – the honours go to Vergelegen’s White 2005. This is a sauvignon blanc-semillon blend that spent 10 months in wood, half new. It’s a wine that is gathering a great track record and playing a large part in the growing “awareness” of white blends in South Africa, though of course we have always had these, especially in the cheap and cheerful categories.

I for one like this direction (of blended whites) since I find many sauvignons rather dull in their straight-forward freshness. At the same time, our producers are upping their game with chardonnay, being more judicious with wood and making very elegant wines. I think it’s well time for us to love chardies again (though many kept on loving them anyway).

This week sees the publication of edition four of Rossouw’s Restaurants, the 2007 guide. This is the Cape’s best restaurant guide if you care for real info and honest opinion on places to eat – not marketing drivel. Look out for it at Exclusive Books, or order it from the site.

Standing on the terrace of the new De Grendel wine cellar, your view of Cape Town and its celebrated rock is remarkable. It’s even better with a glass of champagne in hand. A rondawel could have been built here and people would have been raving. But Sir David Graaff wanted to go all out to make sure that this building harmonised with the surrounds and consulted Ying-Chung Tsai, a Chinese geomancer, on the feng shui of the space.

Whether Charles Hopkins, the burly wine-maker, took some of this advice for the wines I do not know, but Continue reading ‘De Grendel wines’

A great piece on Michel R in Asimov’s Pour, with excellent comments at the end that shed more light on why concepts like purity of terroir and physiological ripeness are useful myths, but dangerous too.

We’ve both been hungry, but missed common tables, until two weeks ago when we ate at Grande Provence where there is a new chef, Peter Tempelhoff. This man has a pretty impressive CV including two years at Quo Vadis, Marco Pierre White’s place, but our experience at GP suggests his flame is not yet burning white. Nothing wrong, and GP is a fine outing with its setting, design and art gallery, but not vastly improved from the incumbent chef.

Aside from the Hungry Man’s remonstrations that he is not, in fact, a fish snob, there was little to report on. HM is of course a fish snob, but he has the good fortune of being in with fishermen and women and eats the blighters straight off the boat, often as sashimi. The facsimile that often ends up on the restaurant table is therefore treated with suspicion.

Yesterday we ate at a new place operated by a friend of ours and run by his mom, the wonderful Judy Badenhorst (ex of River Cafe, Constantia). Lucky Store is deeply quirky, set in the building where the general dealer was in a small winelands community. It’s very local, and very South African. Novilon tiles, shiny washable walls (where the menu is written), melamine table tops. The food is plain but tasty, the kind of place that sardines on toast is a regular for breakfast (and we all know that this kind of place only exists at home).

There is some residual unease… the whities pull into a previously disadvantaged community and turn the general dealer into a “shabby chic” eatery, one which the locals never go to. In this case, they apparently do, so I look forward to seeing that.

We had the only starter, a beetroot and goat’s cheese salad. It came after our main course, a venison pie with stewed sweet potato, but all was hastily devoured, followed by a superb carot cake. Beware wine snobs: take your own wine and expect to drink it from tumblers.

Lucky Store. Idas Valley (at the circle). 072 9082155

A whole winery more, it seems. Resveratrol, the much-lauded cholesterol buster, seems to need to be ingested in huge quantities according to a new study.