Het Parool
This is an english translation of a 2 page article that was
published in Dutch newspaper Het Parool in July 2007. Click here to see the original article in Dutch.
Tailor-made trips to South Africa with your own
personal travel coach
Culinary Wine Trip in the Western Cape
By Marjan Ippel
Amsterdam-based Jos van Krimpen organises culinary wine trips to South Africa’s Western Cape. Exclusive trips filled with personal encounters with winemakers and chefs. ‘I’ll take you to meet my friends.’
We are strolling around Vergelegen wine estate, with in one hand a bottle of ‘V’ - the ‘Château Margaux’ of South Africa – and in the other a crystal wine glass. The sun is setting, the shadows cast by the broad-girthed camphor trees are lengthening. The prestigious, prize-winning ‘V’ rolls round the crystal as we walk, enveloping every step in a scent of plums, blackcurrants and vanilla.
Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton have all set foot in this piece of eighteenth-century South-African history. If they were lucky, they were able to peer through the bodyguards and dignitaries and catch a glimpse of the leafy (rose-lined) paths, sloping lawns, rambling vines and that typical Victorian architecture. But I’ll guarantee you that none of them was able to stroll around and capture the setting sun in such a heavenly glass of red.
Wine and culinary trips are in vogue. They are on offer all over the place. In the past few years, the tourism industry has undergone extensive segmentation: from extremes such as war, disaster and sex tourism to shopping, literature (The Da Vinci Code!), medical and culinary tourism.
For decades we went to a country for its history, culture or the sunshine; now eating and drinking are often the main attraction. We travel to Hong Kong to sample Nouvelle Cuisine Chinoise; fly to California, Australia and South Africa for wine tastings, following in the footsteps of wine films such as Sideways, and we enjoy a spoonful of history and a pinch of culture by way of appetisers.
Big travel organisations have rapidly vulgarised this trend into the newest form of mass tourism. They pack you onto a plane with forty or more other foodies, put you up in mass accommodation and then bus you around the standard tasting sessions put on by the big wine houses they are associated with. Great. If you don’t know any better.
But personal coach in culinary travel Jos van Krimpen does know better. He doesn’t want to travel like that and so we, his guests, won’t either. Instead, he puts us up in small, luxurious lodgings with a maximum of six rooms, making them feel more like home than a hotel; he organises tailor-made tastings and workshops with the crème de la crème of culinary South Africa, giving us the opportunity to raise a glass with independent winemakers such as James McKenzie of wine estate Nabygelegen during a home-cooked dinner in the wine cellar. Our private chauffeur guides us through the gorges of the Western Cape past wine estates with evocative names such as Klein Constantia, Buitenverwachting, Glen Carlou, Waterford, Rust & Vrede, Groote Post and Nabygelegen. Stellenbosch, the TV series that will air on Dutch television from October, was shot on location close to Nabygelegen.
With credentials like this, the trip fits in perfectly with the latest trend in tourism towards the small, personal and exclusive. Not so long ago, tourists would flock together in droves, preferring to eat in restaurants offering food that reminded them of home. Now they want to immerse themselves in the host country, to talk, eat and live with the locals. The new holidaymaker has an insatiable hunger and thirst for unique travel experiences and personal encounters. We don’t want to be tourists, but family friends.
Occupational psychologist Jos has really grasped this fact. Each group he takes consists of a maximum of ten like-minded people, carefully screened by Jos himself, who are shown the stories behind the wines they buy off the shelves in Holland so that, when they are back home, they can regale friends at dinner parties with personal tales about encounters with winemakers and chefs.
I’ll take you to meet my friends,’ and: ‘I want to make memories,’ says Jos, who always comes along himself. And not only that: before each trip he travels from his Amsterdam base for home visits with each of his fellow travellers in order to find out about their expectations and personal wishes. Try that with your regular travel agent.
It’s busy on the terrace of Quartier Français, one of the top venues in bubbly Franschhoek, once a settlement of French Huguenots. The wild herb garden behind the restaurant run by ambitious Dutch chef Margot Janse is in full bloom. And that’s despite the fact that it’s ‘winter’ and the South Africans think that anyone eating al fresco is mad, even though the temperature is still around 27°C. ‘Welcome,’ Margot calls to us, before embracing her good friend Jos. She has prepared a modern, light five-course lunch especially for us, who are by now also Jos’s friends. Like the glass of Moreson (‘Morgenzon’ pronounced the English way) Chardonnay bubbly we had as an aperitif, the meal is characteristic of the standard of food and wine we have been experiencing for days.
For example at Emily’s on the Waterfront, the Fisherman’s Wharf of Cape Town, named the best restaurant on the African continent. Its portly owner Peter Veldsman gave us a resumé of the culinary in’s and out’s of South Africa while we were washing our slaphakskeentjies (ostrich thighs) down with a pinotage Bellevue PK Morkel 2003, at a lunch which was a clever balancing act between the trendy molecular and traditional seasonal African.
The standard was equally high at the fashionable The Showroom in downtown Cape Town. Here former ad exec Bruce Robertson literally cooks in a glass showroom for exclusive cars, doing so in such a subtle, pure way that the experience is not one you’ll forget in a hurry. Though it should be said that the divine waiter Jeremy, who gave our table the feeling that we were the only ones there the whole evening, probably had something to do with it, too. As did the full taste and smell of the liberally used wild herbs.
The Michelin star system has yet to reach South Africa, but the standard of food, drink and professional service that we experienced during our trip are only to be found in Europe at the very top. And yet the prices you pay here would buy you a hamburger at home. South Africa is five-star standard for one-star prices. And what’s more: ‘The culinary VIP’s are very approachable here, unlike in Europe. And their cooking is all authentic and seasonal. Nobody’s a copy-cat, everyone has their own style,’ says Margot during what South Africans call a ‘site inspection’ of her kitchen with its vintage wood-fired oven. For as well as typical African dishes like biltong we sample an international fusion of food with Malayan, Indian, British or French influences: a testimony to the history and population mix of South Africa.
But it is thanks to Jos’s uncompromising appetite for total satisfaction that we end up exactly where you simply have to have been. Precisely because he does not have a big organisation backing him, he is not tied to the big factory-like wine houses, hotel chains and companies that decide what your destination is. And the fact that he is co-owner of a small wine estate is a major contributing factor to his success. Jos is an insider. One with both taste and (vinological) knowledge.
And insiders are what we culinary tourists want. Because what we certainly don’t want is to feel like tourists. And so, at a quiet moment, we also ask about poverty in South Africa and the slums, because so much culinary excess does also make you feel uncomfortable. The insider has no easy answer for us. Black or coloured chefs and winemakers are as yet few and far between. But The Showroom does have a black sous-chef and Emily’s has its own variation on Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen for underprivileged youngsters. But whether the 50 euro per booking that goes to Homes for Kids in South Africa is enough to assuage the nagging feelings of guilt?
We are en route to our next overnight address, Grande Roche in Paarl, where German top chef Frank Zlomke of restaurant Bosman’s will startlingly enough present us with Schmalz (lard) as an appetiser tonight, followed by an unsurpassed Vindaloo lamb skewer, while his Swedish sommeliere Mia will taste the wines herself at the table.
On the way, we talk about our most precious memories to date. Shall we go for the evening full of fresh oysters, lobsters, coquilles and abalones in Japanese style with a terrifically tasty vonkelwijn (Afrikaans for bubbly) in seafood bar Bouillabaisse? Dutch chef Camil Haas and his wife and hostess Ingrid, also located in Franschhoek, shared their South African years with us as if we were old friends. Or the tasting in Boekenhoutskloof with Marc Kent, the enfant terrible of South African wine? While we were eager for stories behind The Chocolate Block, the infamous wine which is matured for 27 months in new barrique (oak) and tastes of chocolate, our new best friend Mark pumped us about Amsterdam football club Ajax.
I am torn between the stay in Klein Genot, an exclusive lodging where I felt less like a tourist and more like a close friend of the family (although I must say when I stay with my own family friends I don’t tend to find rose petals in my bed at night) and the walk with ‘V’ at Vergelegen. I think I’ll go for the latter.
(Inset)
Amsterdam-based Jos van Krimpen (43), occupational psychologist, stand-up comedian, singer/guitar-player, wine buff, gourmand and organiser of both culinary wine trips and trips for managers suffering from burnout, went to South Africa some years ago for an eye operation. It was during this medical-cum-pleasure trip that he discovered a country where the service, quality and surroundings are of a standard no longer found in Europe. On returning home, he dropped the culinary trips to Tuscany and Bordeaux from the programme on offer by his one-man travel agency in favour of exclusive culinary wine trips to South Africa’s Western Cape. In ten days he will take you to insider addresses in Cape Town, the Cape Peninsula, Constantia, Wellington, Paarl, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek.
For more information please visit: www.exclusiveculitravel.nl
The wines named in this article are also available in the Netherlands.
Tailor-made trips to South Africa with your own
personal travel coach
Culinary Wine Trip in the Western Cape
By Marjan Ippel
Amsterdam-based Jos van Krimpen organises culinary wine trips to South Africa’s Western Cape. Exclusive trips filled with personal encounters with winemakers and chefs. ‘I’ll take you to meet my friends.’
We are strolling around Vergelegen wine estate, with in one hand a bottle of ‘V’ - the ‘Château Margaux’ of South Africa – and in the other a crystal wine glass. The sun is setting, the shadows cast by the broad-girthed camphor trees are lengthening. The prestigious, prize-winning ‘V’ rolls round the crystal as we walk, enveloping every step in a scent of plums, blackcurrants and vanilla.
Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton have all set foot in this piece of eighteenth-century South-African history. If they were lucky, they were able to peer through the bodyguards and dignitaries and catch a glimpse of the leafy (rose-lined) paths, sloping lawns, rambling vines and that typical Victorian architecture. But I’ll guarantee you that none of them was able to stroll around and capture the setting sun in such a heavenly glass of red.
Wine and culinary trips are in vogue. They are on offer all over the place. In the past few years, the tourism industry has undergone extensive segmentation: from extremes such as war, disaster and sex tourism to shopping, literature (The Da Vinci Code!), medical and culinary tourism.
For decades we went to a country for its history, culture or the sunshine; now eating and drinking are often the main attraction. We travel to Hong Kong to sample Nouvelle Cuisine Chinoise; fly to California, Australia and South Africa for wine tastings, following in the footsteps of wine films such as Sideways, and we enjoy a spoonful of history and a pinch of culture by way of appetisers.
Big travel organisations have rapidly vulgarised this trend into the newest form of mass tourism. They pack you onto a plane with forty or more other foodies, put you up in mass accommodation and then bus you around the standard tasting sessions put on by the big wine houses they are associated with. Great. If you don’t know any better.
But personal coach in culinary travel Jos van Krimpen does know better. He doesn’t want to travel like that and so we, his guests, won’t either. Instead, he puts us up in small, luxurious lodgings with a maximum of six rooms, making them feel more like home than a hotel; he organises tailor-made tastings and workshops with the crème de la crème of culinary South Africa, giving us the opportunity to raise a glass with independent winemakers such as James McKenzie of wine estate Nabygelegen during a home-cooked dinner in the wine cellar. Our private chauffeur guides us through the gorges of the Western Cape past wine estates with evocative names such as Klein Constantia, Buitenverwachting, Glen Carlou, Waterford, Rust & Vrede, Groote Post and Nabygelegen. Stellenbosch, the TV series that will air on Dutch television from October, was shot on location close to Nabygelegen.
With credentials like this, the trip fits in perfectly with the latest trend in tourism towards the small, personal and exclusive. Not so long ago, tourists would flock together in droves, preferring to eat in restaurants offering food that reminded them of home. Now they want to immerse themselves in the host country, to talk, eat and live with the locals. The new holidaymaker has an insatiable hunger and thirst for unique travel experiences and personal encounters. We don’t want to be tourists, but family friends.
Occupational psychologist Jos has really grasped this fact. Each group he takes consists of a maximum of ten like-minded people, carefully screened by Jos himself, who are shown the stories behind the wines they buy off the shelves in Holland so that, when they are back home, they can regale friends at dinner parties with personal tales about encounters with winemakers and chefs.
I’ll take you to meet my friends,’ and: ‘I want to make memories,’ says Jos, who always comes along himself. And not only that: before each trip he travels from his Amsterdam base for home visits with each of his fellow travellers in order to find out about their expectations and personal wishes. Try that with your regular travel agent.
It’s busy on the terrace of Quartier Français, one of the top venues in bubbly Franschhoek, once a settlement of French Huguenots. The wild herb garden behind the restaurant run by ambitious Dutch chef Margot Janse is in full bloom. And that’s despite the fact that it’s ‘winter’ and the South Africans think that anyone eating al fresco is mad, even though the temperature is still around 27°C. ‘Welcome,’ Margot calls to us, before embracing her good friend Jos. She has prepared a modern, light five-course lunch especially for us, who are by now also Jos’s friends. Like the glass of Moreson (‘Morgenzon’ pronounced the English way) Chardonnay bubbly we had as an aperitif, the meal is characteristic of the standard of food and wine we have been experiencing for days.
For example at Emily’s on the Waterfront, the Fisherman’s Wharf of Cape Town, named the best restaurant on the African continent. Its portly owner Peter Veldsman gave us a resumé of the culinary in’s and out’s of South Africa while we were washing our slaphakskeentjies (ostrich thighs) down with a pinotage Bellevue PK Morkel 2003, at a lunch which was a clever balancing act between the trendy molecular and traditional seasonal African.
The standard was equally high at the fashionable The Showroom in downtown Cape Town. Here former ad exec Bruce Robertson literally cooks in a glass showroom for exclusive cars, doing so in such a subtle, pure way that the experience is not one you’ll forget in a hurry. Though it should be said that the divine waiter Jeremy, who gave our table the feeling that we were the only ones there the whole evening, probably had something to do with it, too. As did the full taste and smell of the liberally used wild herbs.
The Michelin star system has yet to reach South Africa, but the standard of food, drink and professional service that we experienced during our trip are only to be found in Europe at the very top. And yet the prices you pay here would buy you a hamburger at home. South Africa is five-star standard for one-star prices. And what’s more: ‘The culinary VIP’s are very approachable here, unlike in Europe. And their cooking is all authentic and seasonal. Nobody’s a copy-cat, everyone has their own style,’ says Margot during what South Africans call a ‘site inspection’ of her kitchen with its vintage wood-fired oven. For as well as typical African dishes like biltong we sample an international fusion of food with Malayan, Indian, British or French influences: a testimony to the history and population mix of South Africa.
But it is thanks to Jos’s uncompromising appetite for total satisfaction that we end up exactly where you simply have to have been. Precisely because he does not have a big organisation backing him, he is not tied to the big factory-like wine houses, hotel chains and companies that decide what your destination is. And the fact that he is co-owner of a small wine estate is a major contributing factor to his success. Jos is an insider. One with both taste and (vinological) knowledge.
And insiders are what we culinary tourists want. Because what we certainly don’t want is to feel like tourists. And so, at a quiet moment, we also ask about poverty in South Africa and the slums, because so much culinary excess does also make you feel uncomfortable. The insider has no easy answer for us. Black or coloured chefs and winemakers are as yet few and far between. But The Showroom does have a black sous-chef and Emily’s has its own variation on Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen for underprivileged youngsters. But whether the 50 euro per booking that goes to Homes for Kids in South Africa is enough to assuage the nagging feelings of guilt?
We are en route to our next overnight address, Grande Roche in Paarl, where German top chef Frank Zlomke of restaurant Bosman’s will startlingly enough present us with Schmalz (lard) as an appetiser tonight, followed by an unsurpassed Vindaloo lamb skewer, while his Swedish sommeliere Mia will taste the wines herself at the table.
On the way, we talk about our most precious memories to date. Shall we go for the evening full of fresh oysters, lobsters, coquilles and abalones in Japanese style with a terrifically tasty vonkelwijn (Afrikaans for bubbly) in seafood bar Bouillabaisse? Dutch chef Camil Haas and his wife and hostess Ingrid, also located in Franschhoek, shared their South African years with us as if we were old friends. Or the tasting in Boekenhoutskloof with Marc Kent, the enfant terrible of South African wine? While we were eager for stories behind The Chocolate Block, the infamous wine which is matured for 27 months in new barrique (oak) and tastes of chocolate, our new best friend Mark pumped us about Amsterdam football club Ajax.
I am torn between the stay in Klein Genot, an exclusive lodging where I felt less like a tourist and more like a close friend of the family (although I must say when I stay with my own family friends I don’t tend to find rose petals in my bed at night) and the walk with ‘V’ at Vergelegen. I think I’ll go for the latter.
(Inset)
Amsterdam-based Jos van Krimpen (43), occupational psychologist, stand-up comedian, singer/guitar-player, wine buff, gourmand and organiser of both culinary wine trips and trips for managers suffering from burnout, went to South Africa some years ago for an eye operation. It was during this medical-cum-pleasure trip that he discovered a country where the service, quality and surroundings are of a standard no longer found in Europe. On returning home, he dropped the culinary trips to Tuscany and Bordeaux from the programme on offer by his one-man travel agency in favour of exclusive culinary wine trips to South Africa’s Western Cape. In ten days he will take you to insider addresses in Cape Town, the Cape Peninsula, Constantia, Wellington, Paarl, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek.
For more information please visit: www.exclusiveculitravel.nl
The wines named in this article are also available in the Netherlands.
