tuesday

Off to a perfect start!

Our loaded scooters illustrate a basic difference between male and female travellers.

Ethene’s modern Vespa is loaded with bags and cases, straps and cords, while mine looks almost empty.

Both vehicles are fitted with baskets to hold our possessions. I have a small carrier attached to the front of mine, but it is empty

We set off from Muizenberg in warm, sunny weather with a cool breeze blowing from False Bay.

Seagulls wheeling overhead and a team of trek fishermen hauling in their net as we buzzed past.

Up and over Sir Lowrie’s Pass to arrive at Paul Cluver wine estate at midday. Our stay there included introductions to all manner of subject not wine-related.

Norwegian celebrity chef and food columnsit, Andreas Viestad, whose TV show, “Modern Scandinavian Cooking,” is a regular visitor to the estate and has inspired the Cluver family to plant the most amazing garden, which produces vegetables and fruit I’d never heard of before. Apart from more than 50 varieties of tomatoes, we discovered “finger lemons,” which were shaped rather like a twisted human hand and exuded the most powerful zest, and tree tomatoes.

We wandered from area to area, picking and eating delicious ripe figs as we went and tossing the peels to plump ducks that were scavenging among the trees.

Lunch-time conversation was mostly about cattle breeding and the merits of using imported semen for breeding, rather than breeding from local bulls.

We tasted the 2009 Paul Cluver Chardonnay, reluctantly released onto the market because the high demand had depleted stocks of the 2008. This was followed by a complex citrus and herb nuanced sauvignon blanc and finally the mind-blowingly delicious 2009 Weisser Riesling Noble Late Harvest, rich with the flavours of ripe apricots and honey.

A distinctive feature of the offices at Paul Cluver is that most of the furniture has been built of huge slabs of wood cut from alien trees. The result is uniquely impressive.

New at the estate since my last visit was the brandy still. I look forward to tasting the products of this hand-crafted copper still built in Stellenbosch.

Reluctantly we loaded the scooters (with a couple of added bottles, of course) and set off for Hermanus. Only after leaving the farm did I realise we had not been shown a single vineyard – in almost 30 years of wine writing, this is certainly a first for me.

From Bot River we encountered a fierce headwind that slowed us right down to about 60km/h for a while, but we arrived in good form, stopped to fill up with fuel before heading for De Werf, where we settled in for the night.

Altogether a very satisfactory day’s ride. Both scooters are doing well and long mountain passes and headwinds have not bothered us at all.

Day 2.

Cold and rainy today, but as we have planned an “unstructured” day, we plan to stay indoors, write, read and relax.

There’s no point in battling the weather on scooters. This is meant to be for fun.

Later:

The weather's clearing, so we have buzzed up to Newton Johnson wines, where we can make Internet contact. 

We visited Creation Wines earlier -- tasted a really fine Pinot Noir. It's a very new winery, reached via a truly horrendous gravel road (from a scooter point of view). The Hemel en Aarde valley abounds with good pinot noir wines, so we are devoting much of our tasting time to sampling and comparing the various styles. 

Another significant part of our quest is finding places with good e-mail reception. Not so easy here in the valley.

The pleasant quest continues.