Sundowners at Singita, where guests can take the chance to sample some of the best wines in South Africa, followed by dinner pairings.
For close-up encounters with wild animals in their natural habitat, it’s hard to beat a safari in Kruger National Park and the adjacent Greater Kruger area. In addition to the state-owned national park, some 20 fenceless private reserves flanking the park’s western border combine to create a vast 2,250,000ha wilderness area.
Watered by the Sand and Sabie rivers, the lusher south attracts the highest concentrations of game, and in the private concessions – a few located within Kruger National Park but most found in the private reserves of Greater Kruger – knowledgeable guides and the right to traverse off-road can bring you within spitting distance of predators. Conveniently, it’s also a year-round destination: from May, when winter pares back foliage and water sources shrink, animals are easier to spot, and sunny days are bookended by bitingly cold but clear nights. Summer can be hot and humid, but dramatic thunderstorms perfume the air with petrichor, migrant birds flit by like jewels and the flowering knob thorns are puffs of pale yellow under a deep-blue sky.
Less enthralling, at least until recently, was the wine offering. With the exception of Luke Bailes, founder of Singita, lodge owners saw wine selection as secondary to building suites the size of apartments, with plunge pools burbling in timber decks. House wines were, for the most part, risible – unforgivable really, given what’s been being produced across the Cape in the past two decades – but recent years have seen a marked improvement.
For wine consultant Stephan Niehaus, who moved to the Lowveld in 2017, the challenge was not only to improve lists but to root wine culture in a region more than 1,500km from the Cape. ‘It’s no good having a cellar full of amazing wines without knowledgeable and passionate wine stewards and sommeliers,’ he says. ‘Wine tastings and intensive training trips to the Cape can make a huge difference. The lodge owners that have grasped this are reaping the rewards. If great wines are an integral part of the safari experience, and shipping arrangements easy, guests can also relive their safari memories once home.’
Here, then, are four Kruger lodges that offer an in-house tour of the Cape winelands – and Cheetah Plains is another worth highlighting. All have been picked for their hospitality, location, accommodation and, of course, game viewing. Conservation is an expensive business, so none, I’m afraid, is cheap. But with ecotourism a key plank of conservation here, you’re playing your part in protecting one of the world’s greatest wildlife sanctuaries.
Singita Lebombo
Southeastern Kruger National Park
Singita is the most awarded safari outfit in Africa, and justifiably so: now in four African countries, it offers an experience that floors even the jaded. Lebombo is a personal favourite, as much for the 25m lap pool and groundbreaking Community Culinary School as the location: an exclusive 15,000ha concession in the remote southeast of Kruger National Park, where large prides of lion tussle over territory.
The lodge comprises 15 contemporary glass-walled suites, plus a four-bedroom villa; the best are elevated and cantilevered off steep, vegetated banks above the N’wanetsi river. There are daily tastings in the wine studio and sommeliers and wine stewards are trained to match diverse preferences with a meticulously curated wine list that covers a wide range of winemaking styles.
Visionary conservation-hotelier Luke Bailes invested heavily in Singita’s wine collection from the outset. But its Premier Wine Direct program (which enables guests to ship wines they enjoyed on safari to their homes) really took shape after Bailes noted the impact former head chef and wine judge Francois Rautenbach’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the local wine industry had on guests. Today,…
Source : https://www.decanter.com.master.public.keystone-prod-eks-euw1.futureplc.engineering/wine/tasting-the-cape-in-kruger-best-lodges-for-wine-lovers-538875/
