Delaire Graff

When the Going Gets Graff, You’ve Arrived

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I had just began smelling the contents of the glasses before me, when the CEO himself took-over. The venue was Delaire Graff, that most magnificent wine estate at the top of Banghoek with views from where, on any kind of day, you can see forever. And Johann Laubser, responsible for running all aspects of this destination’s impressive array of culinary, vinous, hospitality, art and lifestyle offerings, just had to make time to discuss the factor responsible for Delaire Graff’s very existence: wine.

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Joke’s on Noakes and the Chardonnay Diet

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caveman

It was a good week to be a glutton. A smiling, happy carbohydrate consuming glutton as opposed to the dour folk who so religiously follow the gospel according to Professor Tim Noakes, he of the constipation-induced grin and dial-a-quote sound-bite. The only thing Noakes likes more than a super high protein egg-yolk omelette with extra fatty bacon is feasting on the reams of newsprint that has followed him and his announcing the evils of all things carbohydrate and pleasurable whilst prophesizing the apparent health-giving properties of a diet comprising mostly of fatty, meaty, cheesy and nutty edibles.

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Greatness and Chenin Blanc

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I howled into Paris determined to find great Chenin Blanc wine. Being a homo sapiens Africanus South, Chenin Blanc is my national white wine, so we are told. It is was one of the grape varieties lovingly crushed by Jan van Riebeeck’s singing slaves at the birth of South Africa’s wine industry in 1659 and since then has been a ubiquitous feature on the local terroir.

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Dining with Chinese Girl

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 Looking hard enough at Chinese Girl, the famous Tretchikoff painting perching on an easel at her new home on the Delaire Graff wine estate, she comes alive. A rustle of the yellow silk tunic, a stirring of that jet black hair, a surly smile set in that intriguing blue-purple face. What lovely red lips.

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Screaming Terroir at Pinot Noir

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Janet Leigh, the original Screamer.
Janet Leigh, the original Screamer.

If Janet Leigh were a bottle of Pinot Noir in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho and Norman Bates was a cumulative representation of terroir, Janet would have screamed her tits off in that shower scene. No grape, besides Chardonnay, reacts with such hysterical abandon to soil, climate and nature’s other vagaries as Pinot Noir.

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