About half way through my wine tour of the Stellenbosch area near Cape Town, South Africa, my tasting notes started to get a little shaky. Lucky then that our guide, Stellenbosch native Sune, had taught us all about the regional wine making process at the first farm: she had clearly seen it all before.

The Wine Flies tour kicked off at Villiera. This family run company is the leading South African producer of Cap Classique – that’s champagne to you and me, except that the French have a monopoly on the name. The farm uses no insecticides, employing natural methods such as ladybirds to control pests, rose bushes as early warning signals (the roses will sicken before the vines do, giving the farmer time to react), and guinea fowl for pest control and natural fertiliser. The farm also runs entirely on green energy.

Sune walked us through the vaults where the gigantic fermentation tanks are. Bottles are stored neck down so that any sediment collects on the temporary bottle cap. The neck of the bottle is then freeze dried, solidifying the sediment, which can then be popped off with the cap. And that gold foil wrapping around the neck that looks so fancy? It used to disguise the fact that some of the liquid was lost with the sediment. Nowadays, however, the bottles are topped back up.

Young wines at Villiera.Young wines at Villiera.

We sat outside in the sun to sample the resulting Tradition Brut and the Monro Brut 08. Our host Guillaume, a descendant of the French family who changed South African wine from a product used to sterilise water into an art form, poured us a glass of each. The tiny little bubbles from the fermentation process and the clean, crisp flavour give the French a serious run for their money.

Meanwhile, Sune gave us a crash course in what to look for when tasting. Apparently, you want legs like Kim Kardashian and a quality that lingers.

Guillaume followed up with a Chenin Blanc with a surprisingly pleasant hint of bananas and vanilla, a jasmine blended Muscat, Gewurztraminer and Riesling, with its fruity, lychee flavour. There was also a Merlot with a subtle scent of bilberries and a Pinotage made from South Africa’s unique combination of Pinot Noir and Hermitage grapes, engineered to resist the intense African summer sun. It was paired with Biltong, a South African dried meat. The Jasmine and Villiera’s Fired Earth port had me handing my credit card over.

By now, we had tried over 25 wines and to be perfectly honest, things were getting just a little bit hazy

By 10am, we were six wines down as Sune loaded us back into the bus for the next stop, Fairview Winery. This is a more commercial location with a lot of tourist traffic, but the compensation is that the wines are paired with cheeses. We started with La Capra Pinot Grigio, a heavy wine with zesty acidity and a sharp apple tang that didn’t work for me. The traditional camembert it came with was excellent however. The oaky green pea and granadilla Oom Pagel Semillon was paired with a 100 per cent goat milk cheese called crottin. The stand out wine here was the Extrano, its tangy tannins accented with clove and cinnamon, perfect with a sundried-tomato-dappled cream cheese.

Using a wine thief.Using a wine thief.

We pressed on past thatched Cape Dutch houses to the Middlevlei winery, where Wine Flies has its very own barrel of an earthy Merlot which we extracted using a glass wine thief. Lunch was a traditional braai of gamey sausage, chicken skewers, creamy potato salad and, oddly, toasties, washed down with local chardonnay.

There was no time for a post lunch slump as we headed on to the boutique wine estate of Lovane, one of the smallest producers in the country specialising in Cabernet Sauvignon. This time, the wines were paired with chocolate, which worked better than you might expect. The Bordeaux blend Isikhati was the hands down winner.

By now, we had tried over 25 wines and to be perfectly honest, things were getting just a little bit hazy by the time we rocked up at Annandale Distillers and Vintners, set in a little patch of rural paradise. They produced the wine for the wedding of Prince Albert and Charlene of Monaco, named the Chalbert. The tasting room was heavily loaded with cobwebs and had a couple of swallows nesting in the bottle store. A fire roared in the open hearth.

Our host amiably cursed his way through the tasting, rails directed towards what he doesn’t like about the wine industry as he poured a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Cavalier and a Shiraz, all aged for eight years in French barrels and, frankly, wasted on me by that point. I would love to tell you about their hints of this and overtones of that, but sadly, my illegible notes peter out completely towards the end of the Lovane tasting. What I will say is that accepting the second shot of brandy was not a wise move.

And thus ended the tastings, but not the evening. By the time we got stuck in traffic on the motorway, Eric, the American policeman on board, was wearing a blue, sequined fedora, Irishman Stuart was trading for cigarettes with cars in the next lane, a bottle of wine was being passed hand to hand and there was something of a dance party going on in the back seat. Wine Flies knows how to show a girl a good time. Sune dropped all of us off at the Cape Town Beer House for further frivolity followed by today’s rather unpleasant headache. As my mother always said, “Beer then wine makes you feel fine, wine then beer makes you feel queer.” It might be a couple of days before I can drink that delicious Jasmine that I bought.

If you want to recreate my experience (the wine tasting, not the subsequent beer and hangover), download the AbuzzWine app to track down some of the bottles we tasted. A full day tour with www.wineflies.co.za costs an extremely reasonable €44.

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