(Pic: Peter Pentz, founder and co-owner (with his son Nick) of the Groote Post winery with some of his products)
Groote Post releases first noble late harvest wine to mark its 300th anniversary and Clos Malverne has a spa.
The Groote Post wine farm on the Cape west coast, near Darling, has released its first noble late harvest wine to mark its three hundredth anniversary; the grapes for this wine were harvested in 2006, three centuries years after the first mention of the farm Klawervallei (now part of Groote Post) in the records of the Dutch East India Company.
In 2006 a small section of Groote Post’s chardonnay vineyards developed botrytis (noble rot), one of the few times this has happened, and the grapes were used to make this luscious dessert wine.
Wine is a recent part of Groote Post’s long history. The farm was originally grazing land and an outpost to protect the area from cattle thieves. The present manor house was built 200 years ago and was a “shooting box” for Lord Charles Somerset, governor of the Cape colony. Hildagonda Duckitt, the doyenne of Cape cookery writers, was born here in 1840 and lived here for many years. The place was run as a successful diary farm until 20 years ago.
Then the owner, Peter Pentz, had a soil map made of the entire farm, and this identified 1,000 hectares as being suitable for high-quality wine grapes. Only the best 117 hectares were used to plant noble varieties, and this planting was completed in 2002. The first bottling of wines on the farm was in 1999.
Today Groote Post is co-owned by Peter Pentz and his son Nick, and they produce eleven different wines: five whites, four reds, a sparkling Methode Cap Classique, and the new noble late harvest, a total of 28,000 cases a year.
The vineyards are only eight kilometres inland from the icy Atlantic Ocean, and the cool sea breezes are a factor in the cultivation of superior wine grapes.
The noble late harvest is a delightful wine for sipping at the end of a good meal, sweet, peaches and honey but with a little refreshing acid undercurrent, and not as potent as it tastes. Alcohol content is 10,5 percent, compared with 12 or 13 percent for most dry white wines. A reassuringly safe luxury. The retail price of the wine is about R100 for a 375 ml bottle (half the size of the ordinary wine bottle).
The farm is situated in the Darling hills an hour’s drive from Cape Town. It offers wine-tasting and sales, lunch at Hilda’s Kitchen (named after the celebrated Hildagonda), a jungle gym and lawns for children to play, nature walks, a bird hide, and game drives to see kudu, black wildebeest, red hartebeest, bontebok, springbok, eland and gemsbok. Phone 022 492 2825.
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Gone are the days when wine estates were just that and no more. Restaurants are now common, and entertainment and other services are proliferating.
The Clos Malverne farm in the Devon Valley, on the outskirts of Stellenbosch, now has a spa offering various treatments such as facials, manicures, pedicures, massages, hydrotherapy and a steam room.
And if it’s wine you’re interested in, the farm has a new glass-fronted tasting centre where, for a fee of R15 a head, you can sample some of its dozen different wines. And if you’re peckish you can order a cheese platter at R90 or a gourmet meat and cheese platter at R140. Phone 021 865 2022. - Michael Green
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