Wine, cheese and charcuterie with flair in the Deep Kar…
The crowd was a group of friends old and new, all of us being spoilt by a mutual friend who had enjoyed a wine tasting at Kranskop between Robertson and Montagu and had taken a range of wines home to the farm, and then decided to take things further.
The planning took weeks. First, you have to decide who you’re ordering from, and what. Then there’s the balancing act of coordinating the courier services with the producers to ensure that the goods reach you intact. There is room for things to go wrong. Nothing, I’m relieved to say, did.
We would order charcuterie from Richard Bosman’s Quality Cured Meats, cheeses from Dalewood Fromage between Paarl and Franschhoek, and a very special whole wheel of Karoo Blue from Langbaken near Williston in the Northern Cape. And we would have a gathering for the books and create some stories to tell in years to come.
Lonzino from Richard Bosman. (Photo: Tony Jackman)
I was roped in, happily, to order the cheeses and charcuterie through my contacts, having ordered products from both Bosman and Dalewood in the past. The budget was set and off I went, relying on speedy couriers (mostly) to get the goods to us in time. It’s a bit of a balancing act. They can’t send them too soon as these are perishables, especially the cheeses. But they do need to arrive on time.
It was touch and go with the Dalewood order, with the courier only arriving after 7pm the day before the event. This being a Friday. I was very nervous that something might go wrong and we’d have only the charcuterie and one wheel of cheese. But it all worked out in the end.
But for all the beauty of the Dalewood products, I felt we needed that prince of South African cheeses, Langbaken’s Karoo Blue, both for its intrinsic joys and its name that evokes the great Karoo and its forever skies. All we would do with this one would be to display it on a lovely platter, carve a few slim wedges but leave the wheel otherwise intact for its beauty to be…
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