Klein Constantia is one of the Cape’s most historic wine estates, and its success is underpinned by a wine once greatly favoured by the nobility of Europe. It’s an enduring legacy, and Klein Constantia’s famous Vin de Constance will surely continue to inspire and delight for many more generations.
But more about this iconic sweet wine, nicknamed “Napoleon’s wine” by some, a little later.
Klein Constantia makes for an ideal visit if your time in the Cape is limited, as it is situated in the lush slice of heaven that is Constantia, just 20km from the city centre.
Timely highlights of wine writing make a literary buffet on which to feast
Brian St. Pierre reviews
(Académie du Vin Library; £25)
By now, in this plague year, most of us may be feeling more than a bit like the poor dupe in Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado,” walled into a wine-cellar’s alcove, maneuvered into claustrophobic isolation in an extreme of anti-social distancing, and frustrated at being unable to expansively share one of the best things ever created for expansive sharing. Denied wine’s bridge to gregariousness, “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears,” as Macbeth once complained, we need an antidote, and rummaging around in this anthology of wine writing is a good one; it’s a set of keys to open the windows and let some sun shine in again.
Timely highlights of wine writing make a literary buffet on which to feast
Brian St. Pierre reviews
(Académie du Vin Library; £25)
By now, in this plague year, most of us may be feeling more than a bit like the poor dupe in Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado,” walled into a wine-cellar’s alcove, maneuvered into claustrophobic isolation in an extreme of anti-social distancing, and frustrated at being unable to expansively share one of the best things ever created for expansive sharing. Denied wine’s bridge to gregariousness, “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears,” as Macbeth once complained, we need an antidote, and rummaging around in this anthology of wine writing is a good one; it’s a set of keys to open the windows and let some sun shine in again.