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Featured Restaurant: Elephant & Barrel, Franschhoek

In a valley stocked to the brim with some of the worlds best wines, food & people, there is an old English pub in the heart of our village called The Elephant & Barrel. Situated in a picturesque courtyard with a truly traditional pub feel, Elephant & Barrel define a unique experience in the valley [...]

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Featured Restaurant Special: New Years Eve at Dutch East, Franschhoek

Today we wanted to feature something special. Yes, it’s Christmas tomorrow, but we wanted to share one of our favorite places in Franschhoek who happen to be doing something amazing in a week’s time. Dutch East believe that in simplicity and preserving the integrity of the main ingredient. It easy to cook food that tastes [...]

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Haut Espoir Viognier

Keeping up with the tradition to show you some behind the scenes stuff on our wines, we wanted to show off the `08 Viognier today. As summer is in full swing and many an afternoon should be spent around the pool, in the garden or around a picnic basket in the middle of nowhere with [...]

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Featured Restaurant: The Grillroom in Franschhoek

“Hangar steak, just have the hangar, with the Petit Verdot. One of the few places who got 500 bottles of the `06 Vintage”. These were the words of encouragement when I went to try out The Grillroom for myself a while ago after having shared a few emails to show off The Grillroom here, on [...]

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Featured Restaurant: Sótano

Sótano is the newest venture from the company who brought us one of our favorite haunts, Caveau. We have featured their restaurants here before and we are a big supporter of their concepts, as their focus lies on quality, rather than quanity. Something we relate to here on the farm, where it forms one of [...]

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Haut Espoir Chardonnay

“It’s all to do with the Wild Yeast. Chardonnay goes mad for it.” Wild Yeast is one of the topics I could extract most out of Nikey on. For a quiet man, he waxes lyrical on the stuff. If there was a 4th dimension, wild yeast would be where the mouth feel and fullness of [...]

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Haut Espoir Gentle Giant

Continuing in the series from the Shiraz and the Semillon today we are featuring the wine which is the center of our Movember pledge. The Gentle Giant is something that Haut Espoir has become famous for. Something unique and drinkable all night, as Foodie a.k.a David Cope likes to say. Nikey had a concept. It [...]

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Haut Espoir Shiraz

The first comment we inevitably get when we have visitors in the cellar and we get to the Shiraz Barrels is: “Wow Rob, how’s the size of that beauty?” Nikey loves Shiraz and does things a little differently here to truly fine tune the product into something very special. Indeed, 500 liter barrels are used [...]

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Haut Espoir Semillon 2007

We are starting a new feature every week here on the site in that we want to introduce you specifically to some of the varietals on the farm as well as how we do things a little differently here, under the watchful eye of Nikey. Haut Espoir Semillon is made in a lighter style than [...]

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Five things to do with Leftover Wine

Came across this great article here. We hoped you would be able to save the left over Haut Espoir somehow, but really now, is there ever any left? 1. Sangría If your wine isn’t very old, but you can start to taste the oxidation, add sugar. Sangría is a wine punch made from wine, fruit [...]

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