Plett Festival mixes it up on its menu of culture, food and wine, writes Sam Venter for Weekend Post
Wine-and-food pairing has arguably been done to death, so how to put a new spin on it that helps to showcase the wines of the youthful but fast-growing Plett wine region?
And, how to inject some tourist buzz and create a reason to visit the traditionally summery seaside destination in mid-winter? Plett Tourism’s answers to these questions could be a lesson to any small town tourist promotion organisation – take a series of diverse events, group them into a month-long calendar under a unifying banner, and get local businesses on board to host art exhibitions, stage music and drama events, and offer winter specials in their restaurants and accommodation establishments.
The unifying banner is Plett MAD (Music-Art-Drama) which offers a diversity of cultural, food and wine experiences from art walks to fashion shows to a country fair, and including the Plett Fringe, which cleverly offers a platform for performers to make a stopover on their way to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. The innovative Plett Food-Film Festival saw Plett wineries – now numbering more than a dozen – taking centre stage at The White House this week, with the winemakers offering elegant canapes by top local chefs paired to their wines and bubblies. Local produce, from biltong to smoked salmon, oysters and cheeses from Fynboshoek, featured heavily on the menu, with pairings such as Bramon’s strawberry-and-cream cheese pancakes alongside its super MCC. Smoked salmon makes a great partner to bubbly, as it did with Kay&Monty’s oddly-named Champu MCC, while oysters in a strawberry relish teamed up deliciously with a Packwood pink.
Even in this tiny wine-making area, centred mostly around The Crags, the wines are sufficiently diverse to be able to start making comparisons, for example, the fun fizzy Champu with the more serious and traditional lemon-biscuity MCC from Newstead or Bramon’s beautifully bone-dry Sauvignon Blanc MCC. The easy-drinking fruity sauvignon blanc from Redford Lane is very different to Anderson’s Leto Venus from the cliffs above Keurbooms, a denser and more serious sauvignon blanc with citrus, melon and pear notes that feels almost like a lightly wooded chardonnay.
The film aspect of the festival was the feel-good, wine-themed movie A Good Year, while YouTube “film star” Suzelle DIY took the event off the well-worn path of food-and-wine pairing. Her demonstration of how to “wow your guests with a classy dinner party” – including “champagne” cocktails made with a bottle of wine and a SodaStream – had the capacity audience in stitches.
The full-house signs were also up at Emily Moon the following night, where chef Alex Olivier created an outstanding Mexican feast, recreating the dishes from the movie Like Water for Chocolate, where the cook, Tita, pours so much emotion into her dishes that her love and tears physically affect those who eat her food. The eclectic Afro-Mexican themed Emily Moon is the perfect spot to watch the sun set over the curves of the Bitou River, and also proved the ideal spot for an evening that opened with Tequila cocktails and ended with guests rumba’ing and samba’ing to vibrant Latin American music and flamenco dancing above the African bush.
Olivier’s sumptuous banquet included the movie’s famed rosewater quail, which had all the characters pining for lost loves. Al-though he made it with more readily available chicken, the succulent, perfumed result made it easy to understand how Tita’s dish inflamed such deep emotions. No effort was spared in creating the menu – a deceptively light oxtail soup, with layers and layers of intense flavours – was slow-cooked over four days in the wood-burning pizza oven. Likewise the flavourful, juicy pork that took a potentially ordinary pork ‘n bean enchilada to a completely different level. The glamorous “wedding cake” finale with its dense chocolate cake base was topped with a skillfully moulded layer of whipped cream cherry mousse, refrigerated for just enough time to make it firm but not solid.
Like the movie’s emotion-inspiring food, the passion of Olivier and his young team of chefs came through clearly in the attention to detail of the feast, and their eagerness to ensure that the guests had a memorable foodie experience that lasted long after the movie’s closing credits.
