Stellenbosch

We celebrated the first weekend together in South Africa in high style: wine tasting in the Stellenbosch region. For Erika, it was a return to the scene of a previous trip, but this time she and her co-workers all had their significant others to escort them. Once again, we hired the awesome Dean to drive us around from vineyard to vineyard. Ushering a bunch of wine drinking tourists around all day could be torturous, but Dean's a tough ex-cop, so it's a walk in the park for him.  Dean:

The weather and the wine were fantastic and we hit five or six different places. South African wine is quite good and we especially liked a variety called Pinotage, which comes from a grape engineered from two separate grapes (sorry for all the technical terms...) and which one of our hosts complained that the French refer to as a blend, although the South African's would beg to differ. Anyway, pinotage is a full bodied red wine which often has a chocolaty flavor. Wine and chocolate? Oh, yeah.  

The vineyards and tasting rooms were all gorgeous, from the one that was underground:

to the one under a giant English oak:

There was a great anecdote about English oaks being brought to South Africa to make barrels, but the rest of that anecdote is a casualty of the wine tasting... 

When the day wound down we headed to Spier, a vineyard/resort where we had dinner and spent the night. The restaurant served African food and was a little touristy (we had our faces painted. Don't judge- there was a lot of wine involved) but the food was amazing and our friends Dave and Ed joined the band:

We left the next morning with full bellies and loaded down with several bottles of wine from the many vineyards we'd visited. This beautiful region is just over an hour outside of Cape Town and should be part of any visit to the Cape.