Out and about in the Overberg

I’m not sure you can describe this past Saturday through Tuesday in the Overberg a “holiday” but it was a welcome change of scenery after the toils of tasting for Platter’s 2012. My wife, our two-year-old daughter and I stayed on Stanford Valley, a 440ha farm 10km outside of Stanford – accommodation was a self-catering cottage complete with old Dover stove, which we fired up each night to ward off the late winter chill.

Supposedly the wine industry is in dire straits but I was surprised by the amount of new or new-ish wineries in the area. Boschrivier, Raka, Stanford Hills and Springfontein are familiar enough while Brunia came to light when it won a silver medal at this year’s Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show but I have to confess to have no real fix on Misty Mountains, Robert Stanford Estate, Walker Bay Vineyards and Vaalvlei.

Those are just wineries in and around the village of Stanford itself. A visit to the excellent Hermanus boutique wine shop Wine Village owned by Paul and Cathy du Toit led to my first encounter with Faraway House near Villiersdorp and Jakob’s Vineyards from the Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge ward...

The trouble with travelling in the off-season is that many of the country restaurants are closed. Mariana’s is reason enough to visit Stanford but we learnt to our disappointment that this would only be opening again at the end of September while Madre’s Kitchen on Robert Stanford Estate was also enjoying a “winter break”.

This saw us commuting regularly to Hermanus where we dined firstly at Heaven on Newton Johnson Vineyards and then at the restaurant at La Vierge. Heaven where chef Stefan Louw is now incumbent was very good – the food on offer being sophisticated country cooking and likely to appeal to a very wide spectrum of tastes; La Vierge (“The Virgin”) an experience that we decided could only be described as “psycho-sexual boere-baroque” which is not to say totally unlikeable. Both establishments welcome children but neither offer nappy changing tables. Much emphasis on whether or not winelands establishments are wheelchair friendly as there should be but by the same token if wineries are going to accommodate children then changing tables would be a small gesture that parents would much appreciate...

Heaven offers most of the Newton Johnson range of wines by the glass (the excellent and consequently hard-to-come-by Domaine Pinot Noir being the obvious exception) while La Vierge offer only one white and one red. It strikes me that an on-site restaurant provides a winery with the best possible means of showcasing its wines and not to do so is nonsensical. Based on my meal at Heaven, for instance, my advice is that if you fixate on the Domaine Pinot Noir and ignore the rest of the range, you’ll be missing out. At La Vierge, meanwhile, I opted for a bottle of Josephine Pinot Noir 2009 from sister-property Des Dieux and while it went well enough with Springbok sausages, I would have preferred to have mixed and matched.