pride of the south.

Where I'm from, there's this place you can go. It's kinda far from my house, but worth every mile on the odometer. To get there, I have to drive through miles and miles of gently rolling Mississippi hills, down a long four-lane highway, until finally, after a dip and a turn, I'm there.
This place is like none other on the planet. It is fed into on all sides by highways bringing people into the heart of Dixie. It has a school, multiple schools actually, and infinite houses made in the good ole Southern way. There are crowded church parking lots on Sundays and crowded bars on Saturday nights. There's good shoppin and even better eatin. There's a big campus and a little camp in this place, and there's a bookstore to absolutely die for. It's quite possibly the best place in the world to walk in circles on a Square. I've been to this place more times than I could ever count, and if you're not from around here and you come visit, I'll probably drag you over to soak up the glory. In this place, people bleed not only red, but a real pretty shade of blue too, and they've got a little nostalgia for the Old South. In this place, there's a big old home that belonged to a fabulous author, and there's a little bit of Manning fever that will never ever die. In this place, people know how to drink and how to dance and how to make good music and better mistakes. The sun shines a little brighter in this place. Jesus walks a little closer. So does this one old Colonel, despite what the Chancellor says. This place that begins with an Ox and ends with a Ford is the center of my summers, the center of my heart, the epitome of my world. This place is like none other on the planet, but the place I went a few weekends ago was pretty dang close, and these days, close is close enough.
It's football season back where I'm from, and when you've grown up in the family I have, you sort of live for football season. When the leaves turn and the pumpkins ripen, I long for Ole Miss and "Hotty Toddy" and "Go to hell LSU."  So even though I'm over here in Africa where the seasons are upside down so things are blooming and the days are gettin longer, my heart is telling me it's time. It's an itch you can't scratch outside of the SEC, so I went to spend a weekend with the only person who could really understand--another Mississippian.

Siri and I met our friends Allie E. and Laura from the big spring break adventure early on a Saturday morning and hopped into a cab to the train station. We wandered around a bit, as South African public transportation couldn't possibly be more vague. We found our train on platform 10 (and yes, I pretended to be Harry Potter a little over halfway between platforms 9 and 10) and settled in. We were going to Stellenbosch, a town smack dap in the center of the winelands, and we couldn't have been more excited. We peaked out the windows every few seconds, watching the city of Cape Town roll away into empty land into long stretching vineyards.

Our two friends also from the trip, Allie D. and Franzie, met us at the station with hugs and laughs and ushered us into a van. Patrick would be driving us on this particular hot Saturday, and our first stop was Die Bergkelder, the fine manufacturers of Fleur du Cap wines. We got our first glasses of an unfiltered Merlot and took ourselves on a little tour of Bergkelder's wine museum. On the hour, we set off on a tour of the facilities, checking out the wines in barrels and the pipes that took them to filtering tanks and the tubes that ran from the tanks to the bottling machines and finally to the cellar. It was in the cellar that we were educated on Fleur du Cap wines, beginning with Sauvignon Blanc and moving right along to Chardonnay, Pinotage, and Cabernet Sauvignon. We finished with Noble Late Harvest, the sweetest wine to ever touch my lips. Seriously. This wine has over 100 times the amount of sugar in a normal bottle, produced from a very specific rotting grape with a very specific type and amount of bacteria. (It sounds grosser than it was.)
After Die Bergkelder, we headed to Simonsig, which unlike Die Bergkelder, had its own on-site vineyards. (Die Bergkelder commissions vineyards all over the winelands to grow their grapes.) There we had sparkling wine, Sweet Rose, and another Pinotage and Merlot. We sat on a porch with a large cheese platter and sipped while we laughed and soaked in the sun.

 

 

If you know me, though, you know a cheese platter is not going to hold me over very long, so at our next vineyard, we settled in for lunch with a view before moving on to Knorhoek. There, overlooking a little white house in the lee of a gorgeous mountain, we had Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc and Rose and Pinotage and finally, a Pantere.

Running out of time, Patrick told us we had time for one more winery: Muratie. Muratie is one of the oldest family-owned wine estates in South Africa, and they play up this old-timey feel by not dusting. Well, at least not since 1977. No big deal. Here we each had our own wine selections, mine beginning with a white 1763. (Do I know what this means? No. But the people were so terribly nice and recommended it so, there ya go.) This was followed with a red Ansela and a white Laurens Campher. And then, in honor of my Granny, I had a Cape Ruby Port and a Cape Vintage Port to round off my day.

Exhausted, the six of us headed back to Allie D. and Franzie's dorm at Stellenbosch University to rest and rally before walking into the heart of Stellenbosch for dinner. I can't tell you at what point exactly I realized it, but walking past these huge university buildings into streets lined with houses and South African sororities, I realized that this was just what my heart needed: this was Africa's Oxford. Huge trees hung over the streets and families sauntered past on bicycles. A group of guys rushed down the main strip in togas, and I could smell the burgers and beer of the local bar from across the street. We passed infinite restaurants and shops, Allie D. and Franzie explaining the differences, until we reached a big restaurant where we piled into a corner booth. We all collapsed, sinking into the cushions and picking out pizzas and pastas for dinner. That dinner could easily be in the running for longest meal ever, but because of good company, not bad service. We spent at least two hours talking and laughing before we ordered an entire box of desserts, which we promptly ate the second we got back home.

We woke the next morning still exhausted, but ready to see all of Stellenbosch. The more we walked, the more at home I was. Families were sprawled all over the main street for brunch. We saw professors and students and moms and dads and every mix of people possible as we ate and then wandered between the shops. Allie D, who's actually from Oxford, and I pointed out the Mississippi-esc houses and tress and humidity as only fellow Southern girls could understand, and by the time our train came to take us back to Cape Town, my heart was full and satisfied, like I'd just gotten a big dose of Mississippi right there in Stellenbosch. If only they had played some football...