I arrived in Cape Town at 11 p.m. on Saturday night, which was just enough time to get settled and catch a good night sleep (crucial as we were waking up early for a tour of the wine land region).  The South African wine region is about an hours drive from Cape Town and is very reminiscent of Napa and Sonoma.  We hired a driver, which is key!  His name was Wilmart and he introduced himself by saying “you know Walmart, well my name is Vilmart, like Walmart.”  Ok, Vilmart…can you rollback the price of being our private driver then like Walmart does?  No?

Our first stop was Noble Hill, owned by an American family and is located in Paarl.  The son, a Harvard grad, helps out.  He spent a large part of his life growing up in Nigeria and the family has an agricultural background.  Talk about a dream life-moving to one of the most beautiful areas in the world and working on your family’s vineyard.  Noble Hill was by far my fav vineyard (although not my favorite South African wine.  Experiencing my favorite SA wine would have to wait until I visited some local restaurants).  But because my friends were local celebrities there (basically because they were such Noble Hill wine lushes), we got the VIP treatment there and we were slightly buzzed by 11 a.m. 

From Noble Hill we headed to Glen Carlou also in Paarl Valley…pretty vineyard and one of the women working there is from a Cali wine family and her father named a wine after her, but our “sommelier” was a bit of a jerk so that diminished the experience.  It didn’t stop me from buying a pinot there, but when I went to pay for it with my credit card the guy was visibly and verbally annoyed.  He signed loudly when I produced the card and told me he hated credit cards.  I told him that he could either take the card or forget it.  Can you imagine?  

We then went to the town of Franschhoek  to have a decadent lunch at Le Bon Vivant.  The wine was spectacular and the beef medallion was to DIE for (pictures to come)!  I could’ve skipped the starter though, but 2 out of three ain’t bad!  Due to the time constraints, we skipped over to another wine region called Constantia.  We went to a few vineyards there…they were so-so, but I picked up a 2005 pinotage of  Groot Constantia (2005 was an excellent year for South African wine).   Pinotage is a signature South African grape. which I love.  Looking back, I probably should’ve devoted another day to wine tasting in the wine regions, but it wasn’t like I was deprived of wine the rest of my time in Cape Town as each dinner always contained a minimum of 2-3 various bottles of new wines.

We finished the tour around six and said good by to one of our friends who headed back to gloomy London.  Luckily, he’s moving to New York in a few weeks and I plan on dragging him to all things African in New York.  In his honor though we deemed it appropriate to open a bottle of pinotage to have with dinner.   Trader Joes better start expanding its South African wine selection.  That’s all I have to say on the matter!