The Winelands, Privately

The ordinary Winelands day is about the glass and the lunch. This one is about what the estates have kept: centuries of farming on the same ground, a jeweller’s art collection above the vines, and a hundred years of motoring in a set of halls at the foot of the Franschhoek mountains. It is private, so it moves at your pace.

It starts outside Stellenbosch at Rustenburg, a farm whose story goes back to the 1680s and which has made wine for most of the time since. The house and the old farm buildings sit at the end of a long drive under the Simonsberg, with a garden behind them that people visit for its own sake. The tasting is the first of three, and a gentle one for the morning.

Then up the Helshoogte Pass to Delaire Graff, high between the mountains with the vineyards dropping away below it. Laurence Graff, the London diamond jeweller, bought the estate and filled it with art: South African painting through the house and sculpture on the lawns. Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl, familiar to generations as a print, came to him at auction and was brought here. Taste the wine on the terrace, then go and look.

Lunch is in Franschhoek, at a table we book for you. Then L’Ormarins, where the Rupert family makes the Anthonij Rupert wines. The Cape Dutch manor house is a declared national monument, and the cellar moves its wine by gravity rather than by pump.

The Franschhoek Motor Museum is on the same estate, and it is the surprise of the day for people who expected to be bored by it. Cars, motorcycles and bicycles from across the last century are shown in rotation through several halls, so what you find depends on when you come: a veteran car with brass lamps, a racing car, the saloon your grandfather drove. People who do not drive stay longer than they meant to.

If you want the classic version, with the wine tram and a long lunch as the point, that is a day in the Winelands. This is the one for people who like a day with a subject.

Good to know

• Private and on request. Tell us your dates and we confirm what each estate has open.
• Three tastings in the day. Small pours, and leaving them is fine.
• Lunch is an extra. In season the table needs booking early, and we do it.
• The museum and the gallery change what they show. We cannot promise a particular car or picture.
• Wine can be shipped home from the estates. Ask before you buy, not after.