The best travel discoveries are often unplanned and it seems the same often holds true of wine experiences. We discovered Le Lude wine farm in Franschoek by sheer luck. We had an interview lined up with Tim Hoek of Haute Cabrière and after professing our love of sparkling wine, he insisted we make a stop at Le Lude before we left the region. A quick call to his winemaker friend Paul Gerber and we were about to discover a little piece of France right in South Africa.
We recently travelled to South Africa with G Adventures to experience the extraordinary beauty of that country. We found that some of the most stunning settings were in the Western Cape where high mountains rise next to the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Settled into those mountains are South Africa’s two best wine regions: Stellenbosch and Franschhoek.
As you wind up the long, scenic driveway at Waterkloof Wines in South Africa’s Stellenbosch region, the first thing you notice is the building sitting atop the ridge that houses its winery, tasting room, and restaurant. It is a stunning, architectural marvel that features a protruding glass cube to maximize the views of the vineyards and False Bay. And while the facilities are modern and the winery relatively new, it’s the deep connection to the earth surrounding this structure that is truly at the heart of this estate.
There are many great joys of the wine world and one of those is making a new discovery. For us at AdVINEtures, one of our better recent discoveries has been El Dorado County, just outside of Sacramento, California. We were first introduced to this gem of a wine region at the Wine Bloggers Conference 2017. A highlight of that conference was a presentation on El Dorado County put on by a number of their winemakers. That is where we met Justin Boeger, winemaker at Boeger Vineyards, as he poured his Barbera for the group and told us about his family winery. After that presentation we decided we had to check out El Dorado and definitely make a stop at Boeger Winery when we there.
Welcome to our very first VIDEO AdVINEture! Come with us as we explore El Dorado County in Northern California. We visited wineries that included a small hands-on winery with just the winemakers as employees, an urban winery, and a larger production winery that has been in the family for over a hundred years. Join us on our very first VIDEO AdVINEture and let us know what you think!
Cheers!
*Special thanks to LYFTOFF Business Solutions (lyftoff.solutions) for video production*
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