Franschhoek

  Franschhoek, South Africa
Monday, February 6, 2006

Hello Everyone,

The mountain pass from Montegu to Franschhoek was full of beautiful scenery. The mountains suddenly open up and give you a spectacular view of Franschhoek and the valley below. This is such a cute town. There is one main street lined with all the shops and restuarants.







Our travel book said the hardest decision you would have in Franschhoek was deciding which place you would eat at. They were not kidding. It is a gastronomical delight. This small town boasts 5 of the top 100 restuarants in all of South Africa. It also has many award winning chefs. I guess you need to have great food to go along with the 27 wineries in the Franschhoek area. There are hundreds more wineries along the rest of the wine route too. I could have continued on with the trip and left Jack here, he would have been quite happy.

We stayed at a very nice guesthouse here. It was our own private suite within someone's home. We had a private patio to dine outside with a view of their manicured yard and gardens. The suite had a full kitchen and separate bedroom. It was a treat just to shop at the grocery store here and cook for ourselves. The store was full of shelves of excellent wine of course, and at very cheap prices. It also had tons of gourmet foods, tons of cheese, fancy crackers, even caviar if you wanted to really live it up.



We started out the next day to check out the wineries. The first one we tried was called Boschendal. It, like many others, was established in the 1600's. The property was beautiful, it had many views of the close by mountains. We got to do a cellar tour at this one. It was interesting to see how the wine goes from grape to bottle. The french oak barrels the wine is aged in cost over a $1000 canadian plus shipping.





This winery had the same basic set up for wine tasting as many others. You get about 5 or 6 different choices of what you would like to try for about $4CAD. You could try others or some of the limited release wines for a small charge more. Jack really liked a few of the wines here, especially their Shiraz. We had to laugh at a table of guys sitting beside us. There were about 6 guys and over a hundred of the little wine tasting cups covering the table. One question???? Who's driving?






A few other wineries we went to were, Hartenberg, Deliere, and Grand Provence. At the Hartenberg we bought a bottle of a unique naturally sweet Zindfendal. It is made by letting the grapes almost turn into raisons on the vine and they get some strange kind of fungus on them. The wine is very tasty, almost like a dessert wine. Many of the wineries have restuarants where you can have a nice meal and usually a great view too. We didn't do much else here but eat, lol!

Jack was in heaven here sampling all the different wines. I'm not a wine drinker, but enjoyed going to the wineries. The grounds of the wineries were beautiful. The downfall in all this is we will not be able to buy a lot of the wines Jack tasted here. Many of the vineyards produce small batches for local consumption only. Too bad because some of them were really good.





We witnessed a really bad fire on the back hills of the town, the flames could be seen from quite a distance. Apparently they had a horrible fire this past December. The worst one in decades. The surrounding hillsides were all on fire, they could have lost the entire town. Speaking of fires we have been continually hearing about fires on Table Mountain in Capetown. There seems to be one almost weekly. The last one was quite bad. A tourist from England stupidly threw his cigarette and it torched a good portion of the mountain, one lady lost her life. We keep hoping there is some of the mountain left for us to see when we get there.

In the Fransshhoek area is the Victor Verster prison. This is where Nelson Mandela served out the last years of his prison sentence. It is from this prison that he was released, not the famed Robben Island prison where he spent the majority of his early confinement.

Victor Verster prison


Next stop is finally Capetown!