A Wine Drenched Tour Along The Red Route of Paarl, South Afr

The wine tradition in Paarl is older than the roots of the aging Oak Trees that line its Cape Dutch streets. The first European settlers arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, planting the seeds that solidified the Cape's reputation as a wine growing heaven.

Now that the work has already been done, what else can you and I do but savour the delicate fruits pressed with decades of winemaking experience and travel the newly formed routes leading us to the finest wines in the world.

Forget the majesty of the Drakensberg Mountains, try to ignore the historic monuments perched loftily upon pearly hills, the kind of wine tasting to be done in Paarl will require every ounce of your concentration.

Now that we know what we are going to be doing in Paarl, apart from enjoying the scenery, let's make a journey into the winelands, delving into present day winemaking communities, uncovering their interesting attributes and tracing those lively wines to hideaways so often missed by the multitude.

Along the way, if we're lucky, we may make the acquaintance of a genuine Garagiste, a class of heretic garage winemakers shunned in France by the old school traditionalists because of the stir their independently crafted wines create. There might be a hint along the way as to where we might discover one of those who make these