Fine eating – with a Cape icon in the glass 17 August 2006

A review by Tim James

Vin de Constance with Michel Roux Jr
(Lannice Snyman Publishers; 96 pages; R192.50 from Klein Constantia wine tasting centre, some bookstores and wine outlets)

Vin de Constance is arguably the Cape’s most celebrated wine. Klein Constantia’s modern take on the world-famous sweet ‘Constantia’ of a few centuries back is perhaps not quite as renowned as its ancestor – but, then the competition is somewhat stronger these days.

The wine is being celebrated anew, in the most appropriate way: with food. Michel Roux Jr, of the renowned London restaurant Le Gavroche, has designed dishes to accompany Vin de Constance, and these appear in this attractive new book. Local writer Jos Baker has provided a text (well illustrated) giving the history of the wine and UK-based photographer Tara Fisher gives lovely, clever photographs of Roux’s creations (clear, bright food in pale, blurred settings).

The recipes? I’m not in a position to judge Roux – or, indeed, Peter Goffe-Wood who used Roux's recipes as a basis to cook up a storm (as though that were necessary in the Cape right now!) at a function to launch the book. Peter did comment that the recipes are surprisingly simple to execute (is that what one does to smart recipes like these?). What he served was certainly delicious – and went superbly with both older and younger vintages of Vin de Constance.

Of course, there is a preponderance of sweet things on offer in these pages (and I suspect even I could make the Banana Treacle Tart, after a fashion), but also some savoury dishes (like Spice-Crusted Foie Gras with Onion Marmalade, which, having sampled it, I wish I could make – or afford).

I do have the quibble or two that are essential to the pleasure of writing a book review, however benignly intended. This is, as the publisher tells us ‘the first cookbook to be devoted to a single South African icon wine’; we are told quite a bit about its history, surely a paragraph or two could have been spared to tell something about how the wine is made, in vineyard and cellar?

And the (occasionally pale purple) text could have been checked a little more closely. We’re told on page 13 that the Constantia Valley lies ‘between two great oceans – the Atlantic and Indian’; which of course it does not, as is acknowledged some pages later, where we learn that the ‘Klein Constantia estate lies on the narrow Cape peninsular that juts into the South Atlantic ocean’. And it is beyond me to understand why ‘peninsular’ and 'ocean' here should not have capital letters when ‘Southern Hemisphere’, soon afterwards, does. Both practices are acceptable, but there should be some consistency.

Typos, too, are particularly unnecessary in a book with so much presence and so little text. Table Mountain National Park ‘a Word Heritage site’? ‘Klein Constanita’s vinous quest’? A bad mark here for the publisher, which is a pity, as this otherwise seems a worthwhile project well done. May much that is delicious spring from its pages!

COMMENT

From winewriter Neil Pendock:
Vin de Constance seems to sow confusion wherever it pops up.  In the recently published Essential Guide to SA Wines Terroir & Travel by Elmari Swart & Izak Smit (Cheviot, 2006), I was surprised to read (p. 41) that it is now made from Riesling.