Serendpity Winelands Tour

Serendipity
David Caukill
Thu 19 Dec 2013 08:08

Thursday December 19th  2013,

 Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town, South Africa,  33 54.5S 18 25.2E 

Today's Blog by David (Time zone UTC +2.0)

 

In Cape Town, at Christmas, rental cars are hard to come by. Our enquiries of the usual suspects (Hertz, Avis etc.) elicited the South African equivalent of a big raspberry. Undaunted, Peter doggedly persisted through the Google search and eventually was successful in hiring a car. Hooray – for that facilitated our proposed tour of the Winelands. Our outline plan was to visit as many wineries as possible in three days.

 

It may surprise you to hear that visiting a winery is actually not that interesting. Some offer a 30 minute tour of their cellars, but none (at least none that we found) take you to see the grapes or anything of the wine making process. Most simply allow you to taste their wines for a very modest fee.  

 

Now a wine tasting is all about sampling – a splash in the bottom of a glass – all titillation and no fulfilment; so having visited the Blauklippen wine estate near Stellenbosch we arrived  in Franschhoek and walked to the Mont Rochelle estate for a second tasting where we concluded that there were better things to do with our time.

 

if KwazuluNatal is all farms and Game Reserves, then  whatever land there is in Cape Province that is not a winery, is a Golf Estate, each sensitively threading a Championship golf course through a housing estate. The houses are large,  generally five bedrooms or more (in some cases much more) and are largely empty being holiday homes for wealthy city dwellers. Some are set in  spectacular surroundings

 

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These golf courses compete for customers not only on the “quality of the course”, but also the other facilities made available. Visitors can rent one of these houses and the complex often includes a gym, spas, pools, tennis courts, gourmet restaurants etc. They also attract local members.

 

Golfers among you will know that the “quality of the course” means different things to different people. To a scratch golfer it describes the degree of difficulty – the golfing challenge if you like – as well as the care with which the course,  particularly the greens and the bunkers, is maintained and manicured. To comparative rabbits (to which the intrepid crew from Serendipity might be likened), quality is defined as the probability that one will complete the round with as many balls as you started it. [Golf balls that is!]. I call that the Bunny Quotient.  High >75% good; Low < 25% not so good.

 

Labour is quite cheap in South Africa so bunkers the size of the Kalahari desert, which would be prohibitively expensive to maintain in Europe, are commonplace. Land is cheap too and being unconstrained by space,  water hazards – streams, ponds, lakes  and the odd ocean -   abound. The two pictures above were taken at the Pearl Valley Golf Estate near Paarl (aka Pearl). The course was designed by Jack Nicklaus who - as you can see -  did not stint on the provision of water hazards and bunkers; indeed on a number of holes the fairways (if those narrow strips of lawn threaded between the hazards really merit the name) were bounded by sand all down one side and the other side by water; the approaches to each  green were  strewn with - and the green surrounded by - bunkers.    Bunny Quotient? = Nil Points!

 

Playing there may have been a real privilege but after a few holes, our supply of balls seriously depleted, at each shot one wondered whether you would ever see that ball again – and whether your ball supply would last 18 holes (it wouldn’t!). Imagine Russian Roulette played with five live rounds in the chamber!

 

We stayed in Franschhoek, a delightful town set between two ranges of hills/mountains. Now a tourist and retirement destination, it is the place where the a group of less than 300 Hugenots settled when they were resettled from Holland in the 17th Century having earlier fled from persecution by the Catholics in France.  

 

Franschoek means French Point, having been renamed from Elephant Point  after their arrival. There is an impressive monument to the Hugenots:

 

 

So that was about it. A round of golf in Devonvale Golf Estate (Bunny Quotient  = 40%) followed and then a drive back to Cape Town to recover.