Relax with Dax

I was first introduced to the Great Wine Capitals network in 2009 when I was invited to attend the awards lunch for the Great Wine Capitals Best of Wine Tourism Awards. Great Wine Capitals is a global network of cities which have their winelands as a key economic and cultural asset. It exists to encourage [...]

Anandale Road in Stellenbosch provides access to many highly acclaimed wine estates which together form the ‘Golden Triangle‘. I have been to many of them, and you will recognise names such as Bilton, Alto, Ernie Els, Guardian Peak, Hidden Valley and Rust en Vrede. That last estate, well known for it’s multi award winning restaurant, [...]

A while back I reviewed a Peroni event that I attended and I was bemoaning the fact that so few events offer a memorable experience these days. This Audi & Bouchard Finlayson event was one of the few I’ve been to that really stood out from the rest. We arrived at Audi in the Waterfront [...]

Olive oil. When I was young it wasn’t a big thing in South Africa. My father is Spanish and I thought he was weird for pouring it all over his food. But now, olive oil is so prevalent that you couldn’t escape it if you tried. Good quality olive oil, however, is a lot less [...]

I stumbled across Highlands Road estate for the first time when I was previously in Elgin for a wedding. We were looking for somewhere near the wedding venue to do some wine tasting and we found Highlands Road. I remembered that the owners were very welcoming, the place was pretty and the wines were enjoyable. [...]

This is the last of my posts from my recent weekend in Wellington. The other posts cover my visit to Jorgensen’s artisanal distillery and lunch at the Stone Kitchen. I also enjoyed lunch and some opera at Diemersfontein. I’m usually there for Pinotage on Tap, so it was interesting to see the restaurant, Seasons, looking [...]

I don’t like being called a critic. It sounds like I’m always looking for faults. The truth is, while I do like to warn people away from bad experiences, what I enjoy most is sharing awesome experiences with people so that they can go and enjoy it as much as I did. So I’m excited [...]

There are thousands of South African wine labels out there. It is very difficult for an estate to distinguish itself from all the competition in any meaningful way. Each estate obviously has its own story and quirks, but they all have that. Solms Delta is one of the few that differentiates itself very well, offering [...]

I recently went to the launch of the new Earth Centre at Backsberg wine estate. Backsberg has constructed a hay bale house which will serve two purposes, an education centre focused on environmental issues and the offices of Food & Trees for Africa. Food & Trees for Africa have been doing good work in Africa [...]

This weekend I convinced five friends to join me at Franschhoek uncorked, and we had a fantastic day. This was the first year of the Uncorked festival and it’s difficult to review this festival is it is not centralised. Each estate organises some sort of activity or theme for the enjoyment of the visitors. We did [...]

One of my recent highlights, was a visit to Haut Espoir. I’m actually drinking a bottle of their 2006 Syrah as I type this and I’m incredibly grateful I don’t have to share it. Any regular reader of Relax with Dax will know that I definitely have a ‘green side. It can become quite depressing reading [...]