Windswept beaches and rocky bays, sea spray and salty air, endless skies, the freshest fish you’ll ever taste, tenacious fishing villages and remnants of bygone industry, fynbos, wildflowers and wind, always the wind.
There on the west coast, where the icy Atlantic throws up thick sea mists against the shore, roughly halfway from Cape Town to Namibia, in the fishing hamlet of Doringbaai, you’ll find Fryer’s Cove winery.
Operating from an old fish processing factory transformed into wine cellar, tasting room and a wildly popular seafood restaurant on the jetty, this tiny winery somehow manages to capture that wild, salty, enigmatic essence of the Weskus in a bottle.
This is partly because their Bamboes Bay vineyard, just 500m from the seashore, is arguably the only vineyard in the world so close to the ocean.
So distinctive is this spot, with its intense maritime influence on the vines and wines, that the vineyard is demarcated as a ward in its own right in the Wine of Origin system.
Constant buffeting by salt-laden southwesterly winds, together with the layers of seashells and limestone in the soil, lend the wines a distinct ocean minerality, conjuring up sensations of salty tang and oyster shells.
From that vineyard, Fryer’s Cove produces their upper-level Bamboes Bay sauvignon blanc and pinot noir, serious wines with rather serious price tags.
There are also two Doring Bay-labelled wines, fresh and easy-drinking sauvignon blanc and a pinot noir rosé (±R90), happy wines for sharing with a plate of fish or braai.
However, it was the core Fryer’s Cove range that winemaker Liza Goodwin presented recently at the restaurant Merak in Walmer, Gqeberha, where that “west coast essence in a bottle” was channelled into tasty reality through chef Jonno Gunston’s Weskus-inspired menu.
The menu traversed snoek pâte and roosterbrood through west coast mussels with smoked pancetta in a creamy lemon sauce (a win with the smoky notes and citrus tang in the Fryer’s Cove Chenin Blanc), to juicy prawns in a lightly spiced Cape Malay-style curry sauce.
The zesty ocean tang in Fryer’s Cove Sauvignon Blanc 2024 (±R140), with its fresh apple and lemongrass notes, played very nicely indeed with caperberries and sweet pickled onions alongside a super-fresh beer-battered hake fillet.
A spice-crusted, slow-cooked lamb ribbetjie, fall-off-the bone tender and juicy, felt like it had just been freshly pulled off the braai. The meat’s spices and smokiness echoing in the Grenache Cinsaut (my pick of the day, if I really had to choose), and the wine’s juicy berry brightness, earthiness and herbal notes enhancing the lamb flavour.
A transport to another place in a simple glass of wine and plate of food.
Fryer’s Cove wines are available at Preston’s liquor stores and the Main Road Walmer branch has them on special until the end of November, at around 10-15% discount.
