The Grape Escape

My first weekend back in Cape Town, Frosty had been invited to a weekend away called the Grape Escape, which he had also gone to the previous year. I was just going to go as a hanger on, but about 3 days before the event, a space opened up for me too!

On Friday evening, we met up with the group and headed out to Worcester to spend the night at Pierre and Tash's (our lovely organiser) aunt and uncle's small holding. We had a great supper and it wasn't too long after that, that we all went to bed, eager for the arrival of Saturday morning.

All in all there were 11 of us who spent the night and then early the next morning we set off in our teams for Sumsare Wine Farm - which is where the Grape Escape was scheduled to start from. The other wine farms participating this year were Arabella, Ashton Kelder, Excelsior, Bon Courage and Rietvallei.

To give you a bit of background - the Grape Escape is kind of like the Amazing Race and it takes place on the wine farms in the Robertson area. You go from wine farm to wine farm, figuring out clues and performing activities at each farm. Points are given for the accuracy of your activities, as well as the order that the teams complete the entire race.

For our first activity we had to differentiate between different flavours of witblitz. Some decided to use their taste-buds to try and tell the different flavours, but the wiser option turned out to be using your sense of smell to tell the difference! We also each got to taste one of the famous Sumsare fireballs before being given our clue for the next challenge. 

The following activities included rolling wine barrels (my teams barrel broke apart so badly that it was carried off the field in splinters!), a relay race, wading into a dam, wine tasting, wine blending, identification of grape varietals, eating a bunch of grapes, puzzles, a treasure hunt and more wine tasting. At the last wine farm, we were treated to lovely glasses of wine, as well as a delicious picnic lunch which rounded off the Saturday afternoon quite nicely!

The group I was part of entered 4 teams into the race and 2 of our teams came in the top 3 - which meant that at the end of the day we were able to split 72 bottles of wine between the 15 of us! 

Thanks to the Grape Escape organisers and competitors for a lovely day out!

Team Arabella - came 1st overall
Vaunie, Pierre, Gen and Frosty

Team Sumsare (Green) and Arabella
Sumsare was the first team to complete the challenge and came in second place!
(L-R): Tim, Tash, Vaunie, Pierre, Gen, Frosty, Nicky and me

Waving victory flags at the bottom of the garden

Relaxing after a fun day of activities

Our portion of the spoils - this should last us a while I think! Then again...