Apples – One a day might keep the doctor away but a bunch of them fermented in a bottle are way more fun. Cider is the most common apple product with alcohol content ranging from two to almost nine percent in a variety of different brands. You’ll find cloudy and clear variations, sparkling or dark, which tend to be stronger in flavor and alcohol. Because apples have a strong concentration of phenolics, or natural antioxidants found in plants, apple cider is actually a pretty good choice when it comes to alcoholic drinks.

Pears – Much like apple cider but with a far snootier sounding name, perry is an alcohol made from fermented pears that are produced specifically for the purpose – they aren’t very nice to eat, but it goes down like gold when served at room temperature in a tall glass. Interestingly, this alcohol is better known as pear cider to younger crowds, as marketing companies have realized that more young people are buying the drink when it’s called pear cider as opposed to perry.

Pineapples – Sublime for making sweet dessert wine, pineapple alcohol is predominantly produced in Hawaii. It has a tropical taste and is often served cocktail style with a piece of fresh pineapple on the glass to enhance the delicious flavor. This succulent dessert wine pairs well with pizza as the taste if often compared to a dry white wine.

Bananas - Mash them and ferment them and you can make beer. The drink emerged from places like Uganda and Rwanda, and the process for ripening fruit for the process involves digging a hole, lining it with banana leaves and setting it alight – other leaves and unripe bananas are placed on top. After a few days of doing this, the ripening process accelerates and the fruit is ready to be made into a delightful chugging drink.

Heart of the agave plant – Okay so it’s not a fruit but it’s still interesting. The heart of this native Mexican plant is removed when it is about 12 years old, then stripped and heated to produce sap. The fermented sap is the vital ingredient in the production of tequila, which is usually made up of a percentage of agave and sugar. Interestingly, the worm that many people see as a sign of tequila superiority is actually the larvae form of a moth which lives on the agave plant. When they’re found during harvesting it can usually mean an infestation that produces a low quality product – a marketing gimmick gone wrong really.

If you feel like  sitting back and enjoying some classic alcoholic drinks you should try some south african wines who have the best white wine and red wine collections after perfecting their technique for years.

If luxury with a sense of hospitality is what you are after, you need to come to Cape Town. There is no other place in the world that can offer you renowned African hospitality like we can in our hotels. Western Cape hotels are not only stunning, but there is an option for every price bracket. From Lizwe’s Guest House in Guguletu (where you find the best township atmosphere and cooking that money can buy), to the Twelve Apostles Hotel and Spa just off Chapman’s Peak (this is really the height of discerning quality), Cape Town hotels can’t be beaten.

If a view of the sea is your thing, why not try the Table Bay hotel, which overlooks the harbour and has ample space for swinging cats, swinging your newly-wedded partner or just swinging yourself around in the fantastically decorated rooms.

So when considering a holiday, don’t pick a fancy but dull hotel in another bland city, come to a Cape Town hotel. Western Cape hotels can’t be beaten!

I love birthdays, mine in specific but everyone else’s as well. There is something fundamentally sentimental about celebrating the day of someone’s birth that gets me every time. Plus, I love buying presents. I have a whole chest beneath my bed that is dedicated to gift paraphernalia – gift bags, ribbons, pretty little cards, etc.

Whenever I see something that would be particularly suitable to a friend or relative of mine, I buy it on the spot and keep it in the gift chest until the big day rolls around. My friend Rouve, for example would enjoy a good bottle of Franschhoek wine, while my mother is a sucker for any type of off-beat jewelry. Knowing this makes it easy to buy them something special. There is nothing quite like watching someone opening a gift that was bought with them in mind (as opposed to generic things like gift vouchers, toiletries, socks, etc.)

Today is my little brother’s birthday. He is turning 17 and we are taking him out for pizza at a little eatery in Stellenbosch where he goes to school. What an awesome little guy. He was born a relative ‘laatlammetjie’ and his arrival heralded a shift in the general estrogen-drenched vibe that had permeated our household up until that point. All of a sudden there were regular trips to the emergency room for stitches, outings to rugby matches and a wide variety of boyhood accoutrements that always seemed to be underfoot.

I am seven years his senior, which means that by the time he went to grade school I was already making headway with senior calculus. Up until he turned twelve I saw him as a quaint distraction, which is not to say I didn’t love him with all of my pubescent heart – I just didn’t perceive him as an autonomous being. And then, quite predictably, thirteen rolled around and out came the proverbial wolves, or (in the case of my brother) the proverbial lumbering bear cub.

Today he is a star cricket player who is showing so much promise that my dad is tentatively harboring hopes of a Bester family representative in the Protea ranks. He is also academically dedicated and a prefect in his hostel. (Can you tell that I am a little proud?) Add to all of these accolades a pithy personality, a sharp dose of humor and a gentlemanly nature and you can see why I already fear the onslaught of teenage girls that are bound to storm the Bester stronghold at any moment. Plus the little bugger is attractive to boot!

So, suffice it to say that birthdays bring out the sentimental, syrupy-sweet side of my personality that is prone to trumpeting my love for all the people in my life from the mountain tops. This blog is dedicated to my little brother Hermanus Lambertus Bester (affectionately known as Manie). I wish you a lovely birthday and a spectacular life full of love and adventure. And may anyone who ever even thinks of messing with you realise that they will have to deal with a very protective, well-connected elder sister who has your back in all that you undertake. I love you to bits.

I had the most amazing wine the other night. A friend of mine came around and knowing my penchant for pretty wines, kindly brought around a bottle of Diemersfontein Pinotage 2008. What a wine! I classify myself as a wine appreciator (as opposed to a wine aficionado) and consequently I normally take a dim view on people who claim to smell all manner of trendy nuances on a wine’s nose. So, when Andries said that the wine has the most amazing chocolate nose, I was quite prepared for just another glass of red.

I am very happy to report that I was proven thoroughly wrong. It did indeed have a chocolate nose with cigar box and ground coffee undertones (at the risk of sounding like the old farts that I normally pull my nose up at). Suffice it to say, we proceeded to drink that bottle of wine in precisely the manner that you are not supposed to drink a good bottle of wine – fast.

Hangover aside, I nevertheless felt it necessary to sing the wine’s praises to my mother the next day as we sat on the stoep in Riebeek Kasteel, idly chatting about the week gone by. My mother then proceeded to chortle and explain that the distinct chocolate flavor is the result of a combination of chemically-treated woods the winemakers at Diemersfontein use in the initial preparation phases. This little trick is used by every cellar you can think of, even Franschhoek wine is not what it seems. She knows this because she works as a representative for a large chemical corporation that supplies (amongst others) the wine industry.

Jeez, what a downer. I am a big fan of the ‘ignorance is bliss’ school of thought and I don’t like being disillusioned when it comes to certain things. For instance, I choose not to realise that the amazing Quidditch stunts in the Harry Potter movies are the result of clever computer graphics and those wire things they have the actors do in front of a green screen. I also did not need to know that Vin Diesel’s voice is the result of steroids he took when he was younger (in my head he still remains all that is man). Other things I would like to un-know include:

• There really are ghosts, despite what my mother told me when I was four.
• Not all people are created equal, especially not if there is money or status involved.
• Milk is made for little calves and is really bad for humans (consequently pulling the rug beneath the whole ‘Got Milk’ campaign and taking the pleasure out of the consumption of cheese, ice cream and yogurt).
• The very air we breathe is the reason we age (Google ‘oxygen and free radicals’ and see for yourself).
• The feeling we experience when we are in love can be attributed to a number of really interesting chemical reactions in the brain that were designed to get us to procreate.
• Blond hair and blue eyes are the result of recessive genes (despite what Nazi propaganda would have us believe), effectively rendering my whole family genetically inferior.
• The prettier the Labrador, the weaker the hips and the more painful the aging process.
• Parents are actually real people who are prone to selfishness and mistakes, just like the rest of us.

I think life is tough enough without reducing the beautiful things we encounter to a mere sum of their parts. Does this make me immature or naïve? I hope not. I choose to think it makes me hopeful.

It’s hot. I’m not talking slightly balmy, I’m talking start sweating when you wake up and don’t stop until ten o’clock tonight-hot. Jip, the dreaded February heat is upon us and there is not much we can do about it except hide inside air-conditioned buildings.

On the plus side, it’s good for the grapes. At this very moment, every single winery, cellar and distillery in the Cape Winelands is abuzz with activity. Cellar lackeys are running around, dragging great big pressure pumps, stacking French Oak vats and scrubbing sorting tables to within an inch of their lives. Winemakers and administrators, on the other hand, are nervously stomping around the cellar, barking orders and generally being aggressively nervous about the state of the grapes. If they come in too slowly it means that there is something wrong with the harvest, it they come in too fast the cellar’s infrastructure won’t be able to handle it – and God forbid they come in at exactly the right tempo, then it’s just the calm before the storm and something BIG is about to go wrong.

Such is the life of a winemaker in the South African wine industry. As we all gear up for the big showdown that is the harvest, winemakers around the country are getting ready for 16 hour workdays. My father loses an average of 10kg’s each year during harvest time (which he gleefully gains back throughout the rest of the year, of course). Whether this is due to working such long hours or because he’s nervous about the state of the grapes or simply because he has to deal with the divergent opinions of 12 obstinate wine farmers, I don’t really know – suffice it to say I’m getting ready to only see my dad again in April.

But I digress. Back to the heat and why it is good for the grapes. See, the thing is, a grape’s ‘skin’ is porous, which means it can absorb things (especially water). Thus, if it should start raining now, all those lovely bunches of sun-ripened grapes that have been hard at work photosynthesizing the whole bloody summer will absorb the water through their skins and burst – which makes it effectively useless for human consumption OR winemaking. A sad state of affairs really.

So, today’s lesson is: embrace the heat. If it weren’t this hot now, then the harvest would be a disaster and in two years’ time you would have been paying through your ears for lackluster wine. Next time you go on a Cape Town tour or book accommodation in the Winelands for a weekend away, take the time to look around you. Those vineyards don’t just happen to trellis, prune and irrigate themselves; those tidy little rows of grape-bearing plants are the result of backbreaking work at the hands of viticulturists, soil scientists, farmers and farm workers. So uncork a bottle of lovely Chenin Blanc (I recommend the Riebeek Cellars Reserve Chenin, of course) and propose a toast to all the hardworking people that are the cogs in the great South African winemaking machine. Tjorts!

Toast time!

People tend to differ greatly in their opinions as to what constitutes the optimal utilization of vacation time. My parents, for instance, take charge of their leisure time much in the same way as the SS took charge of German citizens during the Second World War. Every stray second is accounted for and employed for maximum enjoyment. This basically means that the beach house we rent in Onrus (a small holiday town situated along South Africa’s southern coastline close to Hermanus) is constantly abuzz with people popping in for drinks, an evening of poker, swanky dinners or snacks on the stoep. This would all be good and well if I could close my door, stick my nose in one of the myriad novels I received for my birthday and generally revel in the fact that I do not have any form of responsibility. If only.

Since my parents both operate in the wine industry they are by necessity very social beings, which means that my sister and I (and to a lesser degree, my little brother) have all been groomed from birth to help them facilitate the variety of social gatherings our home has became renowned for. Therefore my sister can whip up a salad in three minutes flat, while I can clear a table of plates and dinner debris in a manner that would shame even the most discreet French waiter. We are versed in a variety of dinner-time conversation topics that are meant to draw out those people that seem uncomfortable and can swiftly and succinctly steer careless participants away from topics that are not deemed appropriate. My brother on the other hand is merely expected to venture down from his room every now and again so that the league of adoring ladies may exclaim and comment on how much he has grown.

I’m making it sound terrible, aren’t I? The fact of the matter is that these gatherings would be absolutely awesome, if only they didn’t all happen in a matter of three weeks. As it stands, holiday time at the Bester house is incredibly festive and never EVER boring, but in the long run it would make anyone re-evaluate the merits of becoming a hermit. Last night, for instance, we all unanimously decided that it was time for a time-out. We drew the curtains, closed the gate and expected peace to descend for at least for the space of an evening. No such luck. A mere 30 minutes after lock-down had been instituted, a horde of uncles, aunts and cousins descended, stolidly ignoring the drawn blinds, ‘yoohooing’ at the door.

So, what did we do? We got up, laying our much-neglected holiday novels to the side and went down to put out an impromptu al fresco spread worthy of publication. And wouldn’t you know it; we probably wouldn’t have it any other way… We could have been spending our evenings playing online bingo or re-potting petunias, but instead, our home is filled with love, joy and laughter. One really shouldn’t moan about that.

Red or White? Make mine... Wine!

Friday night, I enjoyed a great home cooked dinner hosted by Nomonde, a new friend who is a qualified winemaker at a popular distillery here in Cape Town.

Over dinner among other things, we discussed the flexibility in which wine is consumed lately. I hold the belief that wine is like a culture that should be practiced with traditional regard. Drank with the appropriate food, at the correct temperature and never to be modified with soda water, ice and or other shockers I’ve witnessed before… with Fanta Grape!

She on the other hand, is not the wine snob one would expect her to be. For someone who dedicates her skills and effort to bring out a perfected crisp and an all round brew, you’ve got to admire her coolness and the resilience to remain unperturbed by the thought of it all being ruined and drowned out by commercial cool-drinks.

She recalled an aunt who had for ages been nagging to bring her one of the distillery’s finest. She obliged and months later, called to enquire whether aunty dearest had enjoyed it. Nomonde was in hysterical fits relaying how aunty dearest had found the brew to be too bitter and how she had added something special to the mix…a dash of syrup to every glassful. She also suggested for the distillery to consider this fine trick.

This really goes to show the variety of tastes (pun intended). A perfect example of different strokes for different folks which led me to examine my own strokes. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with holding a culture in high regard. There’s also nothing wrong with rearranging something to suit your needs. With that said, I hope the next time I see someone mix Savignon Blanc with Appletiser, I will not have the urge to scream “No, No! You’re ruining it!” and just smile.

In the meantime I look forward to my tour in Cape Town through a distillery to enjoy a wine tasting evening soon.

It was pointed out to me that I speak about the weather quite a bit. For some reason, meteorological conditions seem to interest people and this could be one of the reason I have such an affinity for weather reporting. Lets speak about something else then.

Such as the WineX, which ran from the 10-12 September at the CTICC. I remember only snippets of this crazy event as I had run the gauntlet of every stall, from A-T [the was no U-Z for some reason]. The party consisted of me, my cousin, his finance and my awesome girlfriend. All our favourite wines from the Riebeek Wes Trip was there as well. We just kept drinking and drinking and drinking… It all became a blur very early on, with my girlfriend smacking me in the rear any time I became to inebriated. Unlike last year [This is my 4th Wine], there was very little in the way of free food, such as crackers and cheese. Only one measly piece of cottage cheese was on display and I was assured that there would be more. Little did I know, that the only food item I would eat for 3-4 hours would be crackers.

I had sampled Grappa, sweet port, honey liquor and other liquid monstrosities which had caused my stomach to cramp. The evening ended at 9pm for us and we crawled home dangerously on my scooter. The ride was over, but the party had just begun. I had to make it in time for my SEO articles, I was on a deadline. I did not have time to compete with a hangover. Until later dear readers.

Eat, drink and be merry in Cape Town

In wine lies the truth, or so maintained the ancient Greeks. Those of us who live in the Cape Winelands tend to agree.

I originally hail from the small wine producing community of Riebeek Kasteel in the Swartland region of the Western Cape. Situated in the midst of what is generally considered a grain growing area, the town nestles at the foot of Kasteelberg, a small mountain range dramatically at odds with the rest of the undulating landscape. It is this little hillock, however, that makes the Riebeek Valley so fertile – rain bearing clouds blow into it, increasing rainfall and with it, the richness of the soil.

Having grown up in this beautiful town as the eldest daughter of a professional winemaker I took my knowledge of wine and the wine industry for granted until I moved to Stellenbosch to study after school. Immersed in that culture since the day I was born I assumed that everybody knew merlot was pronounced with a silent ‘t’ and that pinotage was a uniquely South African cultivar best enjoyed with red meat and venison dishes. To my dismay it turned out most of my new friends’ knowledge of wine was limited to the plonk served at student pubs.

Fortunately, since Stellenbosch is smack bang in the middle of the Winelands, wine tours are a dime a dozen and opportunities to introduce newbies to the culture of the vine abound. Many people are initially put off by the snobbery that seems inherent to most wine connoisseurs and the circles they move in, and rightly so. One can only stand so many references to a ‘forest floor aroma’ or ‘brazenly cigar box aftertaste’ before all of it starts to seem a bit ridiculous.

My opinion is that wine should be enjoyed. Full stop. The truth of the matter is that you don’t need to know all the fancy lingo or name-drop celebrity winegrowers to take enjoyment from a glass of good vino. If you do feel your wine knowledge could do with a bit of a sprucing-up though, don’t hesitate to set out for one of the many cellars and farms that dot the countryside around Cape Town. An informative cellar tour or tasting session might be just the inspiration you need.

Anna-Bet Bester