Cape Town: Wineries in Franschhoek

June 2022

South Africa produces over 10% of the world’s wine, which puts it in the number 8 position according to a statistics aggregation site. Most wineries in South Africa are in the Cape region, and visiting wineries is considered a must do while in Cape Town. None of us were serious wine drinkers, but wineries often offer more than just wine & could be fun to visit, we all agreed to make the trip. Most winery tours seemed to go east from Cape Town to Stellenbosch and Franschhoek, so I decided to hire the same car service (about $30 per person) from our previous outing and make a day out of it. I gave my list to the driver, he took one look at it, and said, “leave it up to me!” I said fine. He certainly would know better than I! The drive was under an hour to the first stop.

The dark brown symbols show where we’ve been, the others are possible points of interest

La Motte winery was the first stop. Our driver said it was the oldest in Fraschhoek, the French immigrant wine makers’ town, producing wine since 1752. It was too early to start drinking, but just walking around the ground was wonderful. Their building and gardens were filled with art.

Next we stopped at Franschhoek town shown above. 300 French Huguenots settled in here in 1688 and turned it into a French town. It only has about 1,000 residents now, but it attracts tourists from all over the world. It looked like a one main street town, but there were many understated fancy eateries and stores lining the street. Yes, a cute little town. Cute & little, an accent mark on both.

Franschhoek Pass Lookout Point was up the road from town.

Two friends from our group had their birthdays to celebrate around that time, thus, I picked a view restaurant associated with a winery for the occasion. A 2 course lunch was excellent and a bargain at about $18 (or $22 for 3 courses; the two birthday girls got the latter). We enjoyed it so much that we forgot to take a picture till the last course.

Boschendal is one of the best known wineries in South Africa, and our driver thought we should check it out. Another attractive place with an artsy interior and interesting shops. There even was a grocery market with fresh deli and bakery items on sale.

Originally, I was planning to stop in Stellenbosch (population: 21,800), the hub town in this wine region. But we were too tired. We visited 3 out of 2,600+ wineries in South Africa, thus, we can hardly say we know about South African wineries. But we did have a nice taste of the sophistication and depth of the wine producing culture in South Africa in Fraschhoek.

All the wineries we stopped at had wines on sale that were priced quite attractively. However, we were heading back to the U.S. in a couple of days & there was only so much we could pack in the suitcases. Too bad, too bad.. Pat kept saying.

itinerary: Johannesburg -> Safari -> Victoria Falls -> Cape Town -> Cape of Good Hope -> Franschhoek