HARVEST festivals, with wineries rolling out the barrels for tourists wanting to get knee-deep into stomping some grapes, have taken off as wine tourism in the Cape continues to reinvent itself.
 
Tourists from Holland, Belgium, the UK and a few Capetonians, accompanied by musicians playing French and Irish folksongs, scrambled on to a hay-laden tractor and chugged into the vineyards at Grande Provence in Franschhoek last weekend. Armed with straw hats, secateurs, crates and wine to keep up the spirits, they eagerly picked grapes by hand before baring their soles for the traditional stomping of the grapes. The day ended with games of French boules and lunch on one long table under the oaks.
 
At Eikendal cellar in the Helderberg winelands, the ceremonial ‘Weintaufe’, or blessing of the harvest, has evolved into a popular highlight on the winelands tourism calendar. Activities include live music, tractor rides, a community market and the baptism and tasting of the first Eikendal wine of the year, straight from the barrel.
 
Squishing Merlot between the toes is not a new thing. Grape stomping goes back as far as Rome in 200BC and was used in all wine-producing countries. For centuries, grapes were picked by hand and stomped to extract the juice from which the wine was made.
 
Today, health regulations have put a stop to that, but a little ‘vino pedicure’ still goes a long way to pull in the tourists!