South Africa is a cultural melting pot of wine and food

A cultural melting pot
South Africa is triply blessed. A long and varied coastline supplies us with an astonishing amount and variety of seafood; our fertile soils and wonderful climate work together to produce an enormous range of agricultural products; and our chequered history has endowed us with a population with such diverse cultural backgrounds that fusion is hardly anything new here.
Of course, you will find a whole range of restaurants serving anything from hamburgers to sushi, but let’s concentrate on our specialities.
Our seafood is legendary, and is best sampled at one of the West Coast’s open air restaurants – not much more than simple shelters on the beach. As well as mussels, fish stew, grilled fish and lobster, you may be offered pickled fish – a well-loved dish which you’ll also find in some traditional Cape Malay restaurants.
Other Malay specialities include fruity, spicy but not overpowering curries, smoorsnoek (a fish dish not unlike kedgeree), koeksusters (a sweet, syrupy treat), bobotie (a spicy mince dish), and some Indian specialities, such as rotis and samosas, with a local twist.
But our cuisine truly is multicultural, and nowhere is this more apparent than at a typical South African braai (barbecue). Now braais are assumed to be the domain of the Afrikaner male, but the reality is not nearly so simple.
Yes, there is an awesome amount of meat, most notably the very Afrikaner boerewors (a spicy, fatty sausage), but there will almost certainly be sosaties too. This is a lightly curried meat kebab, not unlike an Indonesian satay, which was brought to this country by the Malays hundreds of years ago.
And of course, no braai is complete without pap en sous, which is the staple diet of most of Africa. It’s a grits-like maize porridge, cooked up stiff, and served with a relish of vegetables, usually tomato and onion at a braai, or wild spinach (merogo or imifino) in a traditional African environment.
You’ll get the opportunity to try this at most cultural villages, or at one of the many African restaurants which are scattered all over the country.
And, of course, all this food has got to be washed down with something. South Africans are great beer drinkers, and no braai is complete without the brown liquid. More worth trying, though, is the thick, low-alcohol, nutritious traditional African beer, brewed from maize or sorghum.
But nothing can beat a good wine from the Cape – a notable wine-growing region for over 300 years.
Wine from the “Dark Continent”? To many European and American wine drinkers, this is a strange concept. In fact, there are vineyards all over Africa. Algeria and Morocco have been producing wines for decades, and modern wine-making has been set up in places like Zimbabwe and Kenya.
But it is down south in the Cape, where climactic and topographic conditions simulate those of the old wine countries, that the continent’s finest wines are produced. Today, the best of South African wine is up there with the rest, while in the “easy-drinking” category no one beats us!
History has a way with wine, and the Cape’s wine culture, which goes back 350 years, is one that both reflects the country’s troubled colonial and apartheid past – but also shines with the potential and expectation of the modern wine world.
From that long history comes a wine tradition of tastes and styles with its roots in the classic “Old World” of France, Germany and Italy, but also an acute awareness of the contemporary consumer, as has been defined by wine-making in the “New World” of California and Australia.
It has often been said that South African wine is in the unique position of straddling both these wonderful worlds.
It offers marketing possibilities that can be harnessed for the challenges of the new global economy. It can offer the wine-drinking world all kinds of new flavour experiences. It can also show the way to handle such sensitive issues as labour relations in the reality of the beautiful Cape winelands.
Wine for the modern market
In the post-apartheid era, since 1994, South African wine has returned to the world arena with significant impact, growing from some 50-million litres exported that year to topping 139-million in 2000, representing more than 25% of good wine production.
It is still increasing, and Cape wine is reaching even more consumers in more countries. According to the latest figures from exporter association Wines of South Africa (Wosa), international sales for 2001 increased 17.8% compared with 2000, despite the global recession.
Internationally, the industry is small, ranking 16th with about 1.5% of global plantings, but production, at seventh position, accounts for 3% of the world’s wine.
As in most established wine-producing countries, new plantings are taking place at a pace and new varieties of wine grapes as well as new regions are being explored as the country finds itself at the frontline of modern market requirements.
Of the 105 566 hectares under wine grapevines (compared with 98 203 hectares in 1997), according to the latest official statistics, 21.38% is chenin blanc – by far still the country’s most widely planted variety. Sultana (11.28%), a grape that is also used for non-alcohol purposes, is next, followed by colombard and chardonnay.
Cabernet sauvignon comprises the majority of red varieties (a mere 8.36% of total vineyard plantings) in present vineyards, followed by pinotage and shiraz.
White varieties still represent more than two-thirds of the total, but this has moved from an imbalance of 15% red and 85% white in 1990. In 2000 more than 80% of all new plantings were red, with shiraz, cabernet and merlot at the top of the list. At the same time, 87% of all vines uprooted were white, mostly chenin blanc, white French and colombard.
There is a shift from chardonnay to sauvignon blanc, a varietal which lends itself to a larger range of styles and quality levels.
All in all, in the year up to the end of 2000, 6 042.7 hectares of new vines were planted.
In 2000 the total grape crop was about 1-million tons, from which 830-million litres of wine were made by 355 active cellars, of which 185 were non-estate “private producers”, 92 registered “estates”, 69 co-operatives and nine producing wholesalers.
For the more daring diner, South Africa offers culinary challenges ranging from crocodile sirloins to fried caterpillars to sheep heads. All three are reputed to be delicious.
For the not-quite so brave, there are myriad indigenous delicacies such as biltong (dried, salted meat), bobotie (a much-improved version of Shepherd’s pie) and boerewors (hand-made farm sausages, grilled on an open flame).
Those who prefer to play it altogether safe will find that most eateries offer a familiar global menu – anything from hamburgers to sushi to pad thai to spaghetti bolognaise. And you can drink the tap water.
On a single street in a Johannesburg suburb, one finds Italian restaurants, two or three varieties of Chinese cookery, Japanese, Moroccan, French, Portuguese and Indian food, both Tandoor and Gujarati. Not far away are Congolese restaurants, Greek, even Brazilian and Korean establishments, and, everywhere, fusion, displaying the fantasies of creative chefs.
It’s not much different in the other major centres, such as Cape Town or Durban. Restaurant guides that categorise eateries by national style list close to two dozen, including Vietnamese and Swiss.
Those in search of authentic South African cuisine have to look harder for those few establishments that specialise in it – like the justly famous Gramadoelas in central Johannesburg, Wandie’s Place in Soweto, the Africa Café in central Cape Town or smaller restaurants in that city’s Bo-Kaap, in Khayelitsha and Langa.
Or one can watch for glimmers of the real thing. There are varieties of biltong in every café, in big cities and little dorps. Every weekend there wafts from neighbourhoods rich and poor the smell of spicy sosaties being grilled over the braai. Steak houses may specialise in flame-grilled aged sirloin, but they also offer boerewors.
And sometimes, in posh restaurants, there is the occasional fusion dish – not the common merger of east and west, but north and south: marinated ostrich carpaccio at Sage in Pretoria, oxtail ravioli with saffron cream sauce at Bartholomeus Klip in Hermon on the Cape west coast, even Tandoori crocodile at the Pavilion in the Marine hotel in Hermanus.
There is crocodile on the menu and kudu, impala, even warthog at a number of restaurants that offer game. But there won’t be seagull, mercifully, or penguin. Both were staple foods for the strandlopers (or beachcombers) – a community of Khoi who lived on the Cape shore – and the Dutch and Portuguese sailors who made landfall there.
‘Rainbow’ cuisine
It was the search for food that shaped modern South Africa: spices drew the Dutch East India Company to Java in the mid-1600s, and the need for a half-way refreshment stop for its ships rounding the Cape impelled the Company to plant a farm at the tip of Africa. There are sections of Commander Jan van Riebeeck’s wild almond hedge still standing in the Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town.
That farm changed the region forever. The Company discovered it was easier to bring in thousands of hapless slaves from Java to work in the fields than to keep trying to entrap the local people, mostly Khoi and San, who seemed singularly unimpressed with the Dutch and their ways. The Malay slaves brought their cuisine, perhaps the best-known of all South African cooking styles.
The French Huguenots arrived soon after the Dutch, and changed the landscape in wonderful ways with the vines they imported. They soon discovered a need for men and women to work in their vineyards, and turned to the Malay slaves (and the few Khoi and San they could lure into employment).
Much later, sugar farmers brought indentured labourers from India to cut the cane. The British, looking for gold and empire, also brought their customs and cuisine, as did German immigrants.
And black communities carried on eating their traditional, healthy diet: game, root vegetables and wild greens, berries, millet, sorghum and maize, and protein-rich insects like locusts.
Today the resultant kaleidoscope – the famous “rainbow” – applies not only to the people but to the food, for one finds in South Africa the most extraordinary range of cuisines.
SOURCE: http://www.southafrica.info/travel/food/meltingpot.htm
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Clark Wine Center
Bldg 6460 Clark Observatory Building
Manuel A. Roxas Highway corner A Bonifacio Ave,
Angeles Clark Freeport Zone, Pampanga 2023
0922-870-5173 0917-826-8790 (ask for Ana Fe)

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Manila Sales Office
3003C East Tower, Phil Stock Exchange Center,
Exchange Rd Ortigas Metro Manila, Philippines 1605
(632) 637-5019 0917-520-4393 ask for Rea or Chay

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