Spring Wine & Food Pairing Menu – Creation Wines, Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge
HERMANUS, WESTERN CAPE – Inspired by Heritage Day, 24 September, Creation Wines on the Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge invites you to take a trip down memory lane as you experience our new spring pairing menu, launching on Thursday 3 September.
Treating food and wine as vessels for memory, every course carries a personal or national nostalgia – a grandmother’s guava tree, a childhood spent foraging greens on the rocks, the Lucky Star sardines that have fed South African families for generations.
‘Nurturing Nostalgia is a portrait of the way South Africans remember food,’ explains Creation co-founder and creative director Carolyn Martin. ‘Not as recipes in isolation, but as people, places and small acts of care. This menu is our contemporary expression of South African home cooking: rooted in heritage, made with care, and designed to give guests a memory of their own. It begins and ends with the familiar scent of rose geranium fragrance, a quiet sensory loop that carries the idea of the whole menu, which is that memory is not something we look back at; it is something we can taste, share and make new together.’
On arrival: You’ll be greeted at the door and offered a cup of Christine Stevens’ floral garden or honeybush tea. Once seated at the table, you’ll experience a rose geranium hand-cleansing ceremony – our take on the first act of hospitality offered in most traditional South African homes, handwashing, where the basin arrives before the food does. We’ve taken this domestic courtesy and made it the opening move of our menu, incorporating geraniums grown by Christine about twenty minutes from the estate. One leaf floats in the bowl, one is bruised beside it, so the scent is released even before you touch the water. The scent is deliberate. It will return at the very end of the meal, baked into the sponge of the final dessert.
Welcome – Creation Rosé, Confetti Bush: You’ll be served a nasturtium, radish and hummus crudité, decorated with confetti bush flower from the estate. The flower is on the plate before the rosé is in the glass – our petticoat-pink blend of Grenache Noir with a touch of Syrah and a small percentage of Viognier, picked early and cool. A berry, spice and floral bouquet – the same botanical note that’s on the plate. One grown, one fermented.
Course 1 – Creation Sauvignon Blanc, Minerality Rules! Umfino is a Xhosa dish of stiff maize-meal pap cooked through with finely chopped leafy greens, and here you’ll experience it reworked as a dumpling in a green velouté with spiced nasturtium bratzeli and sorrel leaf hearts, with a drop of Sauvignon Blanc placed on each like dew. The memory belongs to sous chef Abongile ‘Abo’ Mafevuka, who grew up in Zwelihle by the sea, and whose mother always sent him down to the rocks to gather sea lettuce. As for the wine, nine months on the fine lees give it a taut, saline line that meets the peppery bratzeli without being flattened by it.
Course 2 — Creation Ridge Chardonnay, ABC (Absolutely Brilliant Chardonnay: Another memory from Abo, namely, pilchards in tomato sauce after school. It’s arguably the most democratic food memory in the country, with Lucky Star having put affordable, shelf-stable protein on South African tables since the 1950s. The famous tin becomes the bread vessel at your table, alongside a dish of sardine, avocado, lime zest, pickled samphire, dune spinach, toasted Cape Seed loaf, lime and garden herbs. You’ll taste the Chardonnay in the dressing as well as in the glass. In the plant-based dish: courgette replaces the sardine.
Course 3 – Creation Ridge Pinot Noir, Red Velvet, or Creation Art of Pinot Noir, Prince Charming: In this dish of ostrich, chakalaka, Malay samp and bean salad with nasturtium, every element is South African to its roots: ostrich farmed in the Klein Karoo since the 1860s, samp and beans – umngqusho, Mandela’s favourite dish – and chakalaka, invented by migrant mineworkers in 1950s Johannesburg townships. Three South African kitchens on one plate: the township, the Bo-Kaap, the Karoo. Chakalaka is arguably the country’s most generous dish: it stretches, it feeds whoever arrives, and every family’s version is slightly wrong to every other family! Chickpea tempeh replaces the ostrich in the plant-based dish..
Course 4 – Creation Syrah Grenache, Oh So Umami…, or Creation Ridge Syrah, Sophisticated Syrah: Where every other course on this menu remembers a plate of food, this one (braaied pulled short rib taco with lime-pickled coleslaw, baby corn and crisps to be eaten by hand) remembers the moment before the plate: standing around the fire with a drink, spice hitting the coals, being told it needs another ten minutes when it needs forty… The food arrives late and nobody minds… It is the shisa nyama of the township, the Highveld braai every Sunday: same coals, different marinade. And it’s the one thing all South Africans do together, which is why Heritage Day is also known as National Braai Day. The plant-based option is a braaied vegetable bake of mung bean tofu, sundried tomato, smoked paprika and dried mushroom duxelles.
Course 5 – Three nostalgic dessert options to choose between. First, our Jasmine Neroli Elixir – Creation Cape White– served with Guava and Custard: guava, a plant-based custard of coconut and oat milk with rooibos-caramel and a crispy wafer bricelet. Sous chef Amber Amrose’s grandmother served guava halves and custard, not occasionally, but every single Sunday. The repetition is the story. The second option is our Sweet Temptation – Creation Fine Cape Vintage – served with an Ystervarkie, in this case a lamington with rose geranium baked into the sponge, with coconut spikes (hence the name ystervarkie, meaning porcupine), honeybush gelato and cocoa nib. Lamingtons are baked in trays, for a crowd, the church fair, a farmers’ market, or individually wrapped as ‘padkos’ for the road. And the rose geranium? Almost nobody consciously notices it; almost everybody feels it: the scent from the hand-cleansing ceremony at the start… The third option is savoury: our Creation Elation Cap Classique – Pure Joy – served with Belnori Sheep’s Gouda, Pecorino, Belnori Phantom Ash and olives. This is cellarmaster Jean-Claude Martin’s choice. In his native Switzerland, every lunch ends with a cheeseboard. It’s not a fancy flourish, simply the ordinary end to an everyday meal. He brought that rhythm here, introducing a favourite European habit to a South African heritage menu.
As always, this menu has been co-created with wellness at its core. Its arc follows human digestive physiology, with each course positioned to serve your body’s particular needs during this season of renewal. ‘As spring lightens the body, course by course, the heart will be nourished by something from the past,’ says Carolyn.
Wine and Food Pairing: R1 595 | Including the Art of Creation: R1 705
Bookings & Information
Creation Wines, Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge, Hermanus
www.creationwines.com
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Creation was founded in 2002 by Swiss winemaker Jean-Claude Martin and his South African wife, Carolyn Finlayson Martin, on a former sheep farm no-one thought would carry a vineyard. Creation’s Pinot Noir blocks were the first virus-free plantings in South Africa post-1994, and today they supply mother-vine material to vine nurseries across the country. Farming regeneratively on the Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge, one of the most biodiverse places on earth, the estate is a WWF Conservation Champion and founder member of the Pebbles Hemel-en-Aarde Project.
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Media Contact
Carolyn Martin
Email: carolyn@creationwines.com
WhatsApp: +27 82 673 1880