DEATH BY WATERMELON

J ust for you, because it’s nearly Easter and the theme of this issue is chocolate, I opened a bottle of Boland Cellar’s Cappupinoccinotage 2012 (R45). It’s not bad as choc-coffee pinotage goes, combining sweet red berries with relatively subtle mocha, but I still prefer my cappuccino hot and foamy, and my cocoa (preferably 70%) in chocolate rather than in wine. On Easter Sunday, I’m planning to roast some lamb, and roast lamb — bristling with rosemary and garlic — calls for cabernet sauvignon, packed with blackberries, cassis and other dark forest fruit along with herbal hints of mint or tobacco leaf.

The Plaisir de Merle 2010 (R150) has plenty of the above, and seems an even more appropriate recommendation after I discover that Charles Marais, who named this Groot Drakenstein farm after his French hometown of Plessy-de-Marly in Longvilliers, died exactly a week before Easter Sunday in 1689.

He succumbed to internal bleeding after being pelted with stones by three “Cape indigenes”. They reportedly asked him (“in a rude manner”) for watermelons, becoming enraged when he replied (in a manner not described) that these weren’t ripe. They duly threw the offending melons and a few rocks at Marais, who fled into his house after being hit in the groin — an injury that proved fatal.

Of Marais’s untimely death, within a year of his arrival at the Cape, there is no mention on the Plaisir de Merle website. Instead, current owners Distell claim that “this land was Marais’s rebirth, a magnificent redemption where his spirit took hold and continues to flower to this day”. Biblical words, evocative of that more famous story of resurrection, and a bittersweet tale to tell while you’re pouring the cabernet.