by Chrissy Iley
You can`t go to South Africa without visiting a winery. Nor should you think of forgetting to visit what is probably the most beautiful farm in the world.
Babylonstoren is one of the oldest Cape Dutch farms with sumptuous fruit and vegetable gardens that are laid out with incredible beauty and quirkiness. There is unique accommodation and wonderful food, and the fattest chickens with the glossiest feathers strut in the gardens. The smell is welcoming and exotic.
The old farm buildings are typically Dutch, white-washed walls in stone or primitive brick, thatched rooves, which somehow look exquisitely cosy and modern. It was first a farm here in 1692. Today it is very much bringing the authentic and historical into the present.
The gardens span eight acres and they have a formal patchwork structure. Each one has over 300 varieties of plants, all edible. Fruits and vegetables are harvested all year round for use in the restaurant. There are different areas with fruit trees, berries, vegetables, ducks and chickens, and even a prickly pear maze. Gravity feeds water into the waterways from a stream in the garden just as it did 300 years ago.
Walking down a path that is lined with various trees, some of which are in bloom, some of which are in fruit, is strangely majestic. There is the big sky and silence, except for the wind through the leaves and your feet on the gravel. It feels exquisite, exclusive.
We sat in the restaurant and ate the produce of the day. Mine was a floral wrap of three cheeses.
There is something about Babylonstoren that is so graceful and so calming it makes you feel at peace as well as incredibly alive. Straight after that we went wine tasting at La Motte.
The Franschhoek valley in Cape Town has to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. Just along from the farm is La Motte, one of the oldest South African wine estates. We went to the tasting room, a large den with largely female sommeliers helping us with wine recommendations. We tasted three whites and four reds. They got more flavoursome as we went along. For me all the white wines were too floral or sweet, surprisingly the Chardonnay was more drinkable than the Sauvignon Blanc. The reds were much more interesting.
I have a friend who does not know anything about wine but always orders the most expensive from the list thinking it is the best. This crass approach always annoyed me but here as we got to the more expensive red wines they definitely got more delicious. There was one, the complex and velvety Shiraz Grenache, that I loved the most and it turned out to be the most expensive of all. When I say expensive I don’t even mean really expensive. The good reds were selling for around 200 Rand, which is about £13.