A Day of Cheese- Fairview Wine Estate Suid-Agter-Paarl Rd, near Paarl, 021 8633609This is the way to live: we earned our daily wage whilst driving around the wine area on the fringe of Paarl. We had just lost a month's wage whilst having marmalade on toast in the morning and were sullen in a "see if I care" kind of manner.
Rosemary's parents are here from Uitenhage so we decided to have a day out. We had seen this glass blowing and moulding place on Top Billing and had vowed to visit it. If it's on Top Billing it must be good, they've got lank style. I like the dream weddings best where Hannes the cricketer is marrying Chavonnê who is an artist and a Pilates instructor. They hold hands and toothily tell us of their uncanny love for one another and nature. And then the caterer, the dress maker, the cake lady and the nice young man that styles the venue to look all Balinese tell us just how loveable Han & Chavo are.
When we got to Red Hot Glass at Seidelberg outside Paarl the glass workers had all just gone on lunch so we admired the bright and brittle display of bowls and paperweights and perfume bottles; allowed any urge to purchase to gently peter out and headed to Fairview and The Goatshed a few farms down the road. If I were to describe Fairview as a precision engine fuelled by wads of your cash it would be unfair and might put you off it. Think of the money you've just saved by not buying that beautiful, luminescent, hand forged glass bowl for R4750; now look at how a fraction of that can be spent on nutritional and personal betterment. Cheese, wine & goats are what makes Fairview famous. The cloven hoofed trademark is everywhere: on the cheese label, in the cheese as goat's milk; the wines are named after them (Goats do Roam, The Goatfather). And you can meet them in person at their Goat Tower residence where they trip up the hazardous spiral staircase, look witheringly at you with yellow eyes because you aren't one of Satan's descendents, and put in some work on the Goat-O-Soft operating system with which they intend to obtain world domination. So after photographing Azriel, Vlad and Jezebel on their tower we moved on in to the Goatshed. The long room has part barn, part dining hall sensibilities. The wooden tables and chairs are mismatched and there are old farm implements and relics arrayed around a ledge on the upper reaches. Notice the old scythe lying in retirement up there: even the Grim Reaper has done some seasonal work on the farm.  |  |
Go for the cheese platter where there are about 20 Fairview cheeses to choose from: soft types like Camembert and Brie, soft and smelly Le Beryl, seasoned cylinders of firm cottagey cheese, What else? Some hard cheeses and some goats' milk cheeses. You can choose 6 or 8 kinds of cheese and these arrive with Fairview-baked bread, a crusty/chewy baguette style loaf. Pour a lot of the good Fairview olive oil onto the plate, mop it up with the bread and squash a lump of cheese on top. The sort of food to give strength to noble exploits like digging a well or ploughing a fine tilthey field. To go with our cheese platter we had a rich and delicious leek and potato soup. Robin had a smoked salmon trout bagel and Felicité had a roasted vegetable quiche that was deep and generous. We finished off with a browse through the wine and cheese shops. I'll write about wine direct from the estate another time. Saw an old-fashioned dough mixing bowl now being used as a wine display rack. Made out of a big hollowed out log and must have been the human-powered predecessor to the big mixing machines used in bakeries now. Hoped to get some bargain cheeses at the cheese shop but the prices were equivalent (or maybe just slightly less) than at a good supermarket. The only concession was at the underweight counter where the price was reduced for the stunted cheeses. You probably end up paying almost the same per kilogram as their bigger siblings. If you are going to go to the Goatshed on a weekend then book on Wednesday or Thursday.
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