so many wines, so little time......

Here is what you do when your day’s plan is to just “visit the wine country”:  you leave your hotel room around 9am and drive for about 1 hour.  So at around 10am, you arrive at your first winery – which is situated at the foot hills of the Hottentots’ Holland mountains (interesting side note:  the mountain was named that way because when the Dutch met the native people – the Hottentots – they described where they came from and told them it was “Holland”.  To which the Hottentots pointed to the mountains and said “this is our Holland” – thus the Hottentots’ Holland mountain….).

Anyway, you make it to this beautiful vineyard at 10am, and then start wine tasting.  Wine tasting does not involve drinking a lot of wine.  Just a sip really.  So even though you taste 6 of them, it’s OK, even at 10am.  But………

There are 22 distinct wine regions in the valleys that surround Cape Town – of which we only saw 4 – and of these, only stopped at a total of …  well, I forget, but not all of them for sure….  Anyway, we ended up tasting roughly a gazillion wines………

We are very happy that we had a guide we us (who did not take a sip of anything), and he did all the driving!

The countryside is very pretty, and the weather was lovely.

I did learn some things , such as:

- Dry wines have higher alcohol content, because in order to make them dry, all the sugar has to be fermented into alcohol.  Thus very sweet wines – on top of being gross – also have less alcohol.

-If a red wine has more tannin, it is obviously too young – but it means that it was kept in oak barrels for a longer time, and thus, if it is also fruity, it will most certainly age well.

- You can actually taste the difference between  wines kept in French oak barrels and American oak barrels.

- The Dutch planted a lot of oak trees here, and they grow well in this climate- but too fast, thus the wood is unusable for wine casks and furniture.

- If you taste enough wines, you stop caring about any of this…………….