STONES UNTURNED
The back roads of Wellington’s winelands have some surprises in store for Nancy Richards
M ACUSHLA is wearing the product: bright-red, hand-stitched strapped sandals or “Lucys”. She’s working a Saturday-morning stint at Redemption, the handmade leather-shoe factory at the junction of Hill and Bovlei roads, Wellington.
The leafy Cape Dutch stoep is lined with people waiting for their orders. From Kraaifontein, Kuils River, Khayelitsha, Port Elizabeth, the shoe merchants come like pilgrims to buy up the prestigious footgear and resell it back home. Inside the shop, no bigger than a large pantry, it is floor-to-ceiling boots, pumps, sandals, slip-ons and satchels in every shade of genuine leather. Paradoxically, Macushla’s vermilion Lucys are made from synthetic leather — she’s vegan. She temps here to raise money for the work she does helping to sterilise, treat or euthanise animals in underprivileged parts of town.
By contrast, Wild Boar Burgers are on the chalkboard menu at the next stop, served with onion marmalade, gorgonzola and coriander mayo.
Twist Some More is a barnyard restaurant on an isolated stretch of Hexberg Road. Chef-owner Johan van Schalkwyk is voicing the lunchtime options to a salivating audience. Plates of springbok carpaccio on rocket with fresh black figs arrive on the table next to ours — visual exotica. We, still full from a mighty breakfast, settle for whistle-wetting tea and a pint of draught.
This is a loop trip around the outskirts of Wellington, the pivot being the newly launched Dunstone Country House at the winery on Bovlei Road.
The star-role renovation here is a guest lounge with a view from the stoep that is paralysingly panoramic. Why, I ask myself more than once, would anyone want to be driving around exploring in a hot car when you could just be sitting inert, drinking this in together with a glass of something chilled from the vines out there?
We squeezed in as much of the Dunstone appeal as possible, a bird-song stroll in the vineyards up towards the jagged Hawequa mountains; a few lengths in the new rim-flow pool edged with roses; a visit to the reedy dam with ducks; wine tasting before a herb-crust Norwegian salmon dinner; and breakfast on the picnic lawn in front of the orchards at the winery’s Stone Kitchen restaurant, a short walk away.
It adds up to the sort of idyll that makes you appreciative beyond the telling.
Owners Abbi and Lee Wallis have borrowed from a Haitian proverb — “The stones in the river don’t know the suffering of the stones in the sun” — for their empowerment wine label “Stones in the Sun”. We bought a bottle.
But bliss is finite and the next day we were back on the road to complete the loop of discovery.
By even starker contrast, this led us past both Vrugbaar, the historic butchers, and Hawequa Correctional, as well as Langkloof Roses wedding and function venue, where a kitchen tea, all petals, giggles and gateau was in progress.
It also took us all the way to Welbedacht, the legendary farm of Schalk Burger and sons, on Oakdene Road. Schalk senior was in residence, overseeing the revamp of the restaurant No 6 (named after Schalk junior’s jersey) in time for the Wellington Wine Festival that weekend where there was to be a wild boar spit braai on the lawn.
Shades of Asterix, these hapless creatures seem to feature big on Wellington menus. Apparently they were first introduced to the area back in the ’20s to combat pests of some sort.
But nature took its course, the incomers mated with the local sows and their progeny have been roaming the bush ever since. According to Schalk senior, they come down for water in the dry season and rootle on his neatly clipped cricket pitch.
And this is where they meet their match. —©