Festival Time

Last week was a busy week here in Joburg with the SA Brandy festival as well as the Oyster, Wine & Food festival over the weekend.

SA Brandy festival

I’ve never attended a brandy festival before so it was a interesting experience for me to really taste, compare & learn about the different South African brandies.

My top 5 list looks something like this:

Van Rhyn’s 20 year

KWV 20 year

Laborie Alambic

Nederburg Potstill Solera

KWV 15 year

The Van Rhyn’s 20 year brandy was the star of the show by miles!

The others are not necessarily in any order and I wouldn’t mind a bottle of each in my liquor cabinet! The price range of the above brandies start at about R150 for the Nederburg Potstill Solera up to R400 for the KWV 20 year with the Van Rhyn’s 20 year setting you back about R1200.

The brandy ambassadors will also make sure that you take note of the difference in price between brandies and whiskies. But they have a point – for R150 you’ll buy an average bottle of whisky but you can buy a really great bottle of brandy.

Van Rhyn’s had an entertaining cooper showing off his barrel-making skills.

Oyster, Wine & Food festival

This was my second time at the oyster & wine festival and I was sceptical this time round. I was afraid that it wouldn't live up to the picture I have in my head of last year’s festival because last year was a jol!

I was glad to be proven wrong. The atmosphere was exactly the same. It is like one huge picnic!

There are a number of benches and tables provided but I think a lot of people learnt their lesson last year and brought their own camping chairs and blankets this time.

Lots of wines to taste and buy – most of them at a better price than in-store.

The food on offer consisted mostly of olives, breads & pastries, cheeses and cold meats. Oh, and of course the oysters!

So first you have to decide which of the handful of wines you just tasted has to come back to the table with you, then you go and source some lovely fresh bread, cheese and meats and then the picnic continues until one of the above needs to be replaced… then it’s back to the tasting tables.

If I may step on my soapbox for just one paragraph…then I would like to ask the organisers to seriously reconsider the ticket system. You had to buy everything with tickets and the queues to buy tickets was ridiculously long and unnecessarily frustrating.

So if you guys are scanning the web to gather feedback of the event I hope you come across my 2 cents’ worth.