Baboons and cover crops, food and wine 2 May 2007

Chris Mullineux prepares for winter at home and goes to Mauritius to train sommeliers

What a lovely long weekend of cold and rain we’ve just had. We were blessed with 120 millimetres of rain over three days, a perfect amount for this time of year.

Thankfully weathersa.co.za correctly predicted the cold front from last Sunday on their website and, given the warning, we spent last week sowing cover crops in our vineyards. We try to put the seed down as close to a good rainfall as we can so that the baboons and guinea fowl have as little time as possible to eat them before they germinate – we have had a couple of years when the baboons have come into the vineyard over a weekend, and eaten a hectare’s worth of lupin and oat seed. Good protein for them – frustrating for us!

Anyway, the good rain over the weekend means the seed will germinate nicely this week as temperatures warm up in the day, and we will have a nice thick combination of cereal and lupins in our vineyard to out-compete weeds, prevent erosion, assimilate nitrogen, and bring insects into the vineyard.

The rain also refills our farm dams, takes away the dust, and means everything will be that much greener from now on. Most welcome indeed!

In the cellar, as I’m sure you can imagine, things are quietening. We have only one batch of wine that is still busy with malolactic fermentation. The rest are finished, and have been sulphured up. We’ve labelled and shipped off the orders that came through during harvest, and even spent a week away doing marketing (the marketing season starts already… time for the London Wine Show in a couple of weeks).

Training in a holiday setting

We at Tulbagh Mountain Vineyards are lucky enough to sell a fair amount of wine on the island of Mauritius, and have just spent a week visiting the resorts where our wine is sold, training the staff (one of the hotels has over 20 sommeliers) on our wines, and on the South African wine industry in general. (That's me standing on the right in the picture.)

I must admit we were a bit worried how our wines would taste in the warm, humid Mauritian climate, but we were pleasantly surprised. The sommeliers have learned to serve most wines a degree or two cooler than normal, and to compensate for this they decant most serious wines before serving. Thankfully our wines tasted lovely, and it is certainly an honour to have them treated with so much respect and professionalism.

One of the highlights of the trip was dining on a floating outdoor restaurant at one of the hotels. Let me paint the picture for you. The hotel overlooks a fairly large, well established man-made lagoon abutting the Indian Ocean. At high tide, the lagoon steadily fills up with seawater (and fish and sharks), and as the tide moves back, the water level drops. As a result of this water movement, there is a healthy sea and mangrove life in the lagoon. The restaurant has been built on stilts, a 500m walk along a wooden promenade in the middle of this lagoon. One dines amongst the mangrove trees and fish, and because of the temperate climate it is perfectly comfortable
sitting out there.

Needless to say, the food was awesome, and in spite of the fact that the sommelier has quite a walk to reach his cellar (on land), the service is impeccable, and I doubt I will ever get to experience our wines in a more special setting.