If you’re planning a trip to Cape Town, South Africa, you must include a Cape Winelands Tour in your itinerary!

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One Day Cape Winelands Tour

Years ago, when I was still spending weekends working at a Virginia winery, a coworker introduced me to Pinotage. It was love at first taste – a rich, smoky red as intense as Cab Sauv but far easier to drink. And then I found out that it was born in the faraway land of South Africa, catapulting that country to the top of my travel list (I didn’t know about any of the other incredible parts of SA, but I knew if they could produce something like Pinotage, it had to be worth visiting).

So naturally, I wasn’t going to be able to get anywhere near Cape Town without visiting the famed Cape Winelands. And now having been, I am happy to report that our Cape Winelands tour did not disappoint.

How to Do A Cape Winelands Tour

The bulk of the Cape Winelands region is located about 45 minutes to an hour outside of downtown Cape Town, comprising the  beautiful and historic towns of Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, and Paarl. Because the area is sprawling, home to over 500 wineries, it’s best to dedicate a full day for a Cape Winelands tour.

For total flexibility and freedom, you can rent a car and drive yourself. This will allow you to choose which wineries you visit, how long you stay at each, and which of the towns to explore.

But if you don’t want to worry about keeping tabs on your wine consumption, I highly recommend taking a guided tour. Not only will the guide be your chauffeur for the day, but he’ll also be able to fill you in on the history of South African wine, information about the Cape Winelands, and suggestions for if or when you ever visit the area again. This tour includes stops at several wineries, cheese and chocolate tastings, and a vineyard lunch.

Where to Stay

We stayed in Cape Town and had our tour guide pick us up from there; most Cape Winelands tours offer to do that.

Our Cape Winelands Tour

Fairview

Our tour guide extraordinaire, Charlie, met us bright an early at our hotel in Cape Town. He handed us maps so that he could show us exactly where we were going on our Cape Winelands tour. On the way from Cape Town to our first stop of the day, he talked about the history of winemaking in the region, the industry today, and various cultural aspects of that part of South Africa. While I found all this fascinating, it was mostly to fill the time between leaving our hotel and arriving at stop #1: Fairview.

I’d never been to a South African winery before, so I didn’t know if it was normal for such a place to be so perfectly manicured and welcoming; I was duly impressed! Fairview’s tasting room is surrounded by gardens, reflecting pools, vine-covered arbors, and fountains.

The buildings themselves are harken back to Fairview’s long history. Fairview was first given to Dutch settlers as farm land in 1693, and the first wine was bottled In 1699, making it far older than any wineries on my side of the Atlantic! In 1937, the estate traded hands from the Dutch to a family of Lithuania immigrants, the Backs. Cyril Back and his son, Charles, helped to revolutionize the wine industry in South Africa by moving from the estate-vines only wine concept to harvesting grapes from vineyards across the region. In 1996, Charles was named the second most influential person in the wine industry – after only Nelson Mandela.

All of this we learned while indulging in Fairview’s wine and cheese tasting. Because not only does the estate produce a full range of South African wines, but they also make their own cheeses with the help of the goats you can visit on the property. We got to try seven or eight of the 50 cheese varieties that they make, including the brie, cranberry chèvre, and black pepper cream cheese (we also got to taste 7 or 8 of their wines, hence why I can’t remember exactly how many). My favorite was the camembert paired with Pinotage (of course!).

Drakenstein Prison

Fairview is just a few miles from Drakenstein Correctional Center, the prison where Nelson Mandela was released from in 1990. There’s a statue of him out from, so after our wine tasting, Charlie took us by for a quick photo stop. It’s still a functioning prison, but apparently, if you have extra time, you can take a tour of where Mandela lived when he was here. (Personally, I think it’d be weird to wander around a place that still has actual prisoners, but maybe that’s just me!).

Franschhoek

Next on the agenda for our Cape Winelands tour was an hour stop in charming Franschhoek, which was not at all enough time to spend in this beautiful gem! We complained to Charlie about that, but he insisted that we had other wineries to visit. We forgave him, but Franschhoek is a place I need to come back to.

Of all of the towns in the winelands, Franschhoek is undoubtedly the crown gem. Its one of the oldest towns in South Africa and all of the architecture hails back to its days as a French Huguenot settlement. There are tons of chic restaurants, including several of the best in all of Africa, and adorable boutiques. There is also a “wine tram” to visit the wineries right around the town itself. The tram is a great option if you don’t have a tour or a rental car.

Some of the Cape Dutch architecture in Franschhoek

Lanzerac

From Franschhoek, we took the scenic route (which is every route in the beautiful Winelands), stopping by several historic markers and driving through another well known town, Stellenbosch. Eventually, we reached the final stop of our Cape Winelands tour: Lanzerac Wine Estate.

Like Fairview, Lanzerac is very old, dating back to 1692. But unlike Fairview, and most other South African wineries, Lanzerac became the famous estate that it is because of a woman named Mrs. English, the farm’s owner in the 1920s. Though a male-dominated industry back then, Mrs. English not only renamed the estate in honor of her lover, French general Lanzerac (THAT’s a story), but she also transformed Lanzerac into one of the most modern wineries in the Winelands.

Lanzerac doesn’t only have its cool history going for it. Nestled in an idyllic valley looking across to a dramatic mountain range, it claims one of the most spectacular locations in the Winelands. We got to spend several blissful hours here.

While our tasting at Fairview happened at their typical tasting bar, we arrived at Lanzerac only to discover that we had a picnic table reserved just for us on the edge of the vineyard. We started out going through a list of 10 (10!!!) wines, but they poured several additional ones so Lord knows how much we actually tasted. But the weather was perfect, the landscape was gorgeous, and every wine was better than the one before, so there were no complaints from us!

Fortunately, we got to enjoy a late lunch about halfway through. Their menu consisted of a variety of upscale sandwiches and wraps – I opted for the smoked salmon avocado on rye, which was the perfect accompaniment to Lanzerac’s stellar white wines.

Smoked salmon sandwich at Lanzerac

After several hours of basking in the afternoon sun with a full array of empty bottles of wine on the picnic table, Charlie finally shuffled us into the van and drove us back on to our hotel in Cape Town.

Look how happy we look! And this is BEFORE the 10 wines!

Conclusion

Our Cape Winelands tour was a highlight of our trip to South Africa. And I’m SO glad that we did a guided tour – considering how much wine each winery plied us with, and how large the actual Winelands region is, it was extremely helpful to have both someone to drive us and someone to tell us all the fun facts and information we wouldn’t have known otherwise. I know there are other ways to explore the famed South African wineries, but I can’t recommend this Cape Winelands tour enough.

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