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south africa liquid goldby Catherine Marshall

IN SUMMER, the sweetest of fruits smother the hillsides that sweep down from the Cape’s majestic Hottentot Hollands mountain range. They ripen beneath a warm sky until their skins have tightened and they’re ready to burst. The harvesters gather in the vineyards, row upon row of soldier ants lacing through the groves, plucking the orbs before they fall to the ground in a hot, sticky mess.

In winter, when snow dusts the peaks of the range, the vines lie fallow, naked against the damp coastal air. The workers kneel on the frigid earth, pruning back the stems so that next year’s harvest will be as plump and juicy as the last.

But all year round – in summer, when the mountain peaks seem to kiss the shellacked blue sky; in autumn, when the trees blush pink and red and orange; in winter, when the ground is coated in a layer of hard frost; in spring, when baby-soft leaves emerge from hiding – you’ll find the fruit of these vines ready for the tasting.

Drops are poured at cellar doors across the valleys of the Cape Winelands, where the old, established estates of the 17th and 18th Centuries still stand in all their enduring, Cape Dutch glory. And even today, this nectar still serves some of the purpose originally intended, after Dutch explorer Jan van Riebeeck arrived in the Cape in 1652 and established it as a refuelling station for sailors passing by on their way along the Spice Route to the East Indies: after water and fresh food, wine was the most important resource, for it provided scurvy-susceptible sailors with Vitamin C, and helped to keep up their often flagging morale.

Morale is sky high in the werf (courtyard) of Boschendal, one of the Cape’s oldest and best-loved estates. We’ve gathered beneath the oak trees and wine advisor Phumlisa Pikini is pouring a Sauvignon Blanc from the estate’s 1685 range – named for the year Boschendal was founded. We pair it with a white lime and apricot chocolate, which enhances those same flavours in the wine. The Chardonnay evokes the chocolate’s lemon cream scent as it dissolves on the tongue, while the ripe melon and pineapple and raw honey infusing the botrytis-infected Vin d’ Or (“wine of gold”) are the perfect foil for the marmalade-flavoured milk chocolate.

As we taste wine and chocolate, Pikini tells us the story of these victuals, and the much longer history of the estate itself. Boschendal was named Bos-en-Dal by its French Huguenot founder, Jean le Long, who’d been granted land in the Cape of Good Hope after fleeing religious persecution in Europe in the 17th Century. After phylloxera came to the Cape in the late 1800s, destroying vines, the colony’s former Prime Minister, Cecil John Rhodes, transformed many of the region’s vineyards into fruit farms. Bos-en-Dal was now merged with a second farm and renamed Boschendal.

While some of the original fruit orchards have been preserved, the vines used to produce today’s wine were only planted in 1975. Just 200 hectares of this vast property are under vines; the rest of it is being returned to its natural bush state. And so only a small proportion of the grapes for Boschendal’s premier wines come from this estate; more than 60 other farms in the district make up the shortfall.

So famous were the Cape’s wines in the early development of the colony, Napoleon famously requested a glass of sweet Constantia wine on his deathbed. But though wine has shaped the history and growth of the Cape, the country’s wines weren’t always so well known internationally. The Renaissance only occurred after the end of Apartheid in the early 1990s, explains wine advisor Kyle Hanekom, when the world started to take an interest in the country’s wines. Today, it’s one of the largest producers in the world.

“South African wines are consistently better than average European wines,” Hanekom says, “but when they have a sensational vintage, the results are stratospheric.”

And so they are: at Boschendal I discover the best Chardonnay I’ve ever tasted (and I’ve tried a good few), in the exquisite 2011 Elgin Chardonnay. We take a bottle back with us to our abode for the night, Rhodes Cottage, built on this estate for Rhodes himself in 1795. It’s only recently that the farm’s historic buildings – labourers’ houses, cottages – have been transformed into beautifully-appointed, luxury accommodations, so that once visitors have sampled the farm’s bounty they can settle down for the night in a dwelling imbued with a deep sense of its history.

And so we eat from a dinner basket catered by the farm’s deli – roast chicken, farmbaked bread, an assortment of tiny cakes for dessert – and sip that sweetest of fruits, now turned to liquid gold in our glasses.  More information: boschendal.com; country.southafrica.net

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