Vergelegen

Vergelegen is a winery near Somerset West (we're still in The Cape). It's an impossibly beautiful estate, maintained with fastidious care. With 53 hectares of vines, superb gardens and a small museum we ended up spending seven hours there.



We did a full wine-tasting which only served to illustrate that either I know nothing about wine or somebody at Vergelegen has got things dreadfully wrong. We devised a semi-scientific blind tasting test and I unerringly picked out the cheapest white and the cheapest red as the two which I most preferred.

This did at least make for an economical lunch. Equipped with a bottle of Vin de Florence white (£2.30), we were led to a table amongst the camphor trees and served a wonderful picnic of cold meats and fish.

In the townships the previous day, feeling uncomfortably voyeuristic, we had found ourselves in a broom cupboard sized shack talking to the jolly, toothless woman who lived there. The neighbouring shack had been gutted by fire. In the back yard, a very old woman was burning the hairs off a pair of pigs trotters with a blow-torch - one false move and the homes of a million people would go up in flames.