On our next South African wine adventure, we headed out to Franschhoek to visit wineries that we were unable to visit earlier in our trip when I was ill. Franschhoek, a village settled more than 300 years ago by the French Huguenots, is a picturesque town full of art and antique shops and galleries, coffee […]

When we awakened for this day in the winelands and opened our drapes to the deck, smoke from the mountains was quite thick. The view was just a haze. We later learned that here had been six fires which we thought was significant until we learned that there were 95 fires one day the previous […]

We started our second day in Stellenbosch at Rustenberg Wines, a huge estate equivalent to 3,000 acres, owned by the Barlow Family. It is obvious that there is money here other than wine because only a small portion of the farm is devoted to winemaking; although, they do produce about 120,000 cases of wine a […]

On our first day in Stellenbosch, our first wine farm stop was at Hartenberg Wine Estate established in 1692. The tasting room hostess was nice, but she was juggling our tasting with a phone call about a doctor’s appointment. We tasted four wines at Hartenberg, and while all of them were decent wines, none of […]

On our first day in the Cape Winelands, we were making good time to our morning appointment until we discovered that our exit in Paarl was closed due to road construction. Because we had never been to this area it took us about thirty minutes to circle around and get us back on track to […]

Our next excursion on our South Africa trip was a day trip to the wine farms of the Constantia Valley, a suburb of Cape Town. These wine farms are some of the oldest and most historical in the world outside of Europe, several dating back over 300 years. The setting is beautiful and serene with […]

LaGayle and I are currently in South Africa visiting the major winelands of the Western Cape and tasting as many of their wines as we can that are available in the United States. On our first full day in Cape Town, after taking one of those Hop-On Hop-Off city tours, we walked up to the […]

You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you that the wine industry in South Africa dates back to 1659, but it’s true. In fact, South African wine celebrated its 350th birthday yesterday. During the 1700’s one of the most expensive and sought after wines in the world was Vin de Constance, or “Constantia,” a […]

In the process of cleaning up my desk and purging my files over the holidays, I found notes from four Walla Walla, Washington, wineries that we visited in October on the same weekend we took our vineyard tour with Rich Funk of Saviah Cellars. These four were wineries that we had not had a chance […]

After spending Thanksgiving Day in Seattle, we loaded up the car and headed to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The last time we visited wineries in the area, which was several years ago, we had not had a very pleasant experience. With the increasing notoriety that Oregon has received worldwide as a wine producing region, we decided […]