South Africa with Chateau Montelena

Cape Town rises between mountain and sea, and for the next several days, we’ll get to know both sides of its character. After arriving at Cape Town International Airport, a VIP host assists with arrival before we settle into our home in Sea Point, a lively neighborhood stretched along the Atlantic.

This evening, we meet at the hotel bar for the first toast of the trip and an introduction to our Tastemaker, guide, and the week ahead. Dinner takes us above the city to one of Cape Town’s most exciting rooftop restaurants. As the last light settles over the Atlantic, the kitchen offers our first taste of contemporary South Africa: a cuisine informed by the Cape’s extraordinary produce and generations of cultural exchange. Glasses are filled with local wine, new names become familiar, and our week together begins.

This morning, a cable car carries us toward the flat-topped summit that has watched over Cape Town for millions of years. From Table Mountain, the city spreads below between Atlantic water and rugged peaks. We’ll walk along the summit, coffee in hand, as our guide puts the landscape into context.

Back at sea level, choose your perspective: Cape Town’s contemporary art scene on foot or a bicycle ride along the Sea Point Promenade, where swimmers, public art, and the Atlantic share the waterfront. Lunch brings everyone together at the V&A Waterfront before wine becomes our guide to the afternoon. Rather than leaving the city for the vineyards, we’ll taste our way through intimate urban spaces showcasing the country’s evolving wine culture.

At dinner, Cape Wine Master Harry Melck joins us to give those glasses a deeper story, connecting what we taste to the people, soils, and history of the Cape.

Today we follow the coast south, where mountains drop sharply toward the Atlantic. Near Boulders Beach, a conservation guide introduces us to the African penguin colony that has made this sheltered coastline home. Farther along the peninsula, Cape Point brings centuries of maritime history into view, with waves breaking against a coastline long navigated by sailors rounding southern Africa.

Wine draws us back to the table. A curated tasting introduces a winemaker whose bottles capture the maritime character of the Cape, followed by a private lunch hosted by a local chef known for expressive, ingredient-led cooking. It’s the kind of meal that makes the landscape outside feel inseparable from what arrives on the plate.

Later, we trade stemware for a glass of locally brewed beer before returning toward Cape Town along Chapman’s Peak Drive, its road cut directly into the mountainside above the Atlantic. Dinner tonight is yours to choose.

The morning belongs to Sea Point. Perhaps that means coffee along the promenade or a swim in salt water while Cape Town wakes around you. Later, we gather at the waterfront and turn our attention to a cuisine inseparable from the city’s history: Cape Malay cooking.

The story reaches back centuries to enslaved and exiled people brought to the Cape from Southeast Asia and elsewhere around the Indian Ocean. In the kitchen, we’ll work with the spices and techniques their descendants made distinctly South African, learning how aromatic curries, sambals, and other dishes became part of Cape Town’s culinary vocabulary. Lunch is what we’ve prepared together.

After some downtime, the city changes register. A private cocktail experience leads through tucked-away bars while stories from Cape Town’s past provide the context. Dinner follows at a celebrated wine-focused restaurant, where South African bottles are treated with the seriousness they deserve.

Today the city recedes and vineyards take its place. We begin at one of the Cape’s historic estates, where a legendary sweet wine has been made since the 17th century and once found admirers in European royal courts. A tasting gives us a sense of how deeply South Africa’s wine story reaches into the past.

The next glass points toward its future. At a smaller estate, time with the winemaker brings us closer to the choices happening in the vineyard and cellar today, from site and grape to the character ultimately captured in the bottle.

Lunch is served harvest-table style overlooking vines and indigenous fynbos, with seasonal ingredients setting the menu. Then we continue into Stellenbosch, where oak-shaded streets give way to vineyard estates beneath the mountains. Our evening is intentionally open, with time to settle into the grounds, book a spa treatment, or choose your own table for dinner.

Morning in Franschhoek begins on two wheels. E-bikes carry us along country lanes between vineyard rows and mountains, giving us time to notice the physical landscape behind the wines we’ve been drinking: slopes changing orientation, pockets of shade, the Cape sun warming the valley.

We eventually arrive at a boutique winery for a more intimate tasting, considering how site and cellar decisions find their way into each glass. Lunch follows at a bakery on a historic wine estate, where the emphasis is refreshingly elemental. Bread emerges from the oven with its crust still warm, while produce from the surrounding farms shapes the rest of the table.

The afternoon is deliberately spacious. Back at the hotel, there is time for the pool, the spa, or simply nowhere in particular to be. Dinner is casual tonight, centered around some of the Cape’s best pizza and another bottle worth sharing.

By now, the Cape’s wines are becoming familiar. Today, Cape Wine Master Harry Melck helps us understand the people and places behind them. We begin at a boutique estate cradled by mountains, where the elevation and cooler conditions find expression in elegant wines. The view from the tasting room makes geography wonderfully tangible.

Lunch takes us into a very different corner of the Winelands. At one of the Cape’s oldest estates, the atmosphere is relaxed and the cooking generous, surrounded by buildings and vineyards that have witnessed centuries of change. From there, Harry leads us somewhere smaller and less obvious: an intimate wine farm where individuality matters more than scale and conversation with the people behind the bottles is part of the pleasure.

Our final evening belongs to fire. At a farewell braai, smoke rises from the grill as local wines are poured around the table. After a week spent tasting the Cape, we end as South Africans often do: gathered around the flames.

One last breakfast, one last look toward the vineyards. Afterward, we return to Cape Town International Airport for flights home, or continue deeper into South Africa with a safari extension.

The Cape has given us plenty to carry forward: a better understanding of its wines, the people who make them, and the complicated histories contained in its kitchens and vineyards. Until next time.