Time has become the scarcest ingredient at the Cape table. Across the winelands, estates are bringing older vintages out of the cellar and setting them beside the food, so that age sits on the menu next to the produce. A wine poured at five years carries acidity, tannin and fruit in proportions quite different from the same wine at one, and a kitchen that understands this can cook towards it.
On 29 October, Groot Phesantekraal will test that idea at length. The estate lies in the Durbanville Wine Valley, on the R302 outside Cape Town, and has been farmed for more than three centuries, with four generations of the Brink family in residence. Winemaker Richard Schroeder and chef Germaine Esau host The Art of Pairing, an intimate dinner built around current vintages and older releases from the estate’s wine bank. Guests taste how one cellar speaks across several years, with each course written to meet a particular bottle.
The setting suits the premise. The estate restaurant occupies a stable dating to 1767, where the cobblestone floor and wooden troughs have been kept, custom blue Dutch tiles line the walls, and historical photographs hang against masonry of considerable thickness. A grassed terrace faces the Boland Mountains, and a former fowl-house at the rear seats about twelve for private tastings and dinners.
The kitchen draws on the farm where it can. Free-range eggs, dairy, venison, honey and olive oil come from the estate, with figs and quinces added when they ripen. That gives Esau a pantry with a clear address, and it means the food has grown from the same ground as the wine beside it. Schroeder pours from the estate’s own bottles and Esau cooks from its own land, so the exchange between cellar and kitchen takes place inside a single boundary fence, with no outside supplier to reconcile.
The evening opens with West Coast oysters over a granita of Granny Smith apple and cucumber, poured with the 2021 Cap Classique Blanc de Blancs. The granita adds cold and a green acidity to the brine, and the bottle-fermented wine answers with fine bubbles and a dry finish.
Yellowtail sashimi follows, dressed with nasturtium, pear and Mexican chilli, alongside the estate’s flagship Anna de Koning Reserve Chenin Blanc. Vintages from 2021 to 2025 are poured together, a vertical that lets the table follow a single wine as it ages. The nasturtium gives a peppery leaf, the pear a soft sweetness and the chilli a low heat, all of which Chenin’s acidity and texture can carry.
Next comes waterblommetjiebredie, the Cape stew of water hawthorn flowers, traditionally cooked with lamb, served with the Marizanne Reserve Sauvignon Blanc 2025. A surprise course then introduces the Pinotage 2024, in a pairing the kitchen has kept to itself.
The savoury courses close with sugar-cured beef steak, panisse, duck liver and orange-glazed beets, matched with the 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon. Panisse, the chickpea-flour fritter of Provence, brings a crisp edge to the plate, while the sugar cure and the orange glaze both lean sweet, giving the Cabernet’s structure something to work against.
Dessert is an almond financier with lemongrass, charred pineapple, rum and raisin, paired with the 2025 Noble Late Harvest. The wine is made from grapes concentrated by botrytis, and its sweetness meets the caramelised fruit and the spirit without flattening either.
A wine bank is a quiet form of wealth. Bottles held for years represent capital, labour and patience laid down in glass, and opening them for a table of guests is a considered act of generosity. It also reflects a wider shift in fine dining, where provenance now extends beyond the farm gate to the vintage year, and where chef and winemaker plan a menu together from the first course. Neighbouring estates, among them Durbanville Hills, Bloemendal, De Grendel and Diemersdal, share the valley and its reputation for cool-climate wines, which gives a visit to the area a natural itinerary.
Six courses and six wines is a measured length for an evening. The oldest bottles on the table will have spent their years waiting for precisely this kind of attention, and the younger ones will show, in time, what that waiting produces.