South African officially celebrates the start of Spring each year on the 1st September.  Sometimes, the weather gods play mean tricks on us and serve up a Spring day that is, well, far from spring-like.  This year, the day lived up to its billing as we celebrated the start of spring with warm weather, blue skies and blossoming flowers.

Cellar Rats wine festival

Each year, to celebrate the advent of Spring, a local wine club (The Cellar Rats) hosts a Spring Wine Festival, and this year’s festival took place on Sunday 5th September in blazing sunshine at “The Old Mill”, on the banks of the beautiful Magalies River.  This annual festival is held to raise funds for the Woodlands Preparatory School, situated in Magaliesburg, South Africa.

Magalies River

With a nominal entrance fee (R80/$11) per adult entry, which includes a complimentary wine tasting glass, you get to sample over 600 wines from 110 wine farms.  Each wine farm is represented by its own stall and once you’ve found a wine (or two, or three) that you like, you can then buy individual bottles or order crates of wine from a particular farm. In the interests of safety, a designated driver for each family/car is allowed into the venue for free.

Zoetendal wine bottles

The event is family and child-friendly with an abundance of scheduled children’s activities, including jumping castles, water slides and zorb balls.  Soft drinks are on sale, as are picnic baskets, prego rolls, boerewors (traditional South African sausage) rolls and BLT sandwiches.  For those with classy tastes, you can even buy oysters and champagne!  Live singers provide some great background music (even if you do start to see some karaoke parallels!).

champagne in river

Whilst the majority of the stalls are wine stalls, a small number of deli suppliers also exhibit their wares.  With delightful tastings of pomegranate salad dressing, lemongrass-infused chocolate balsamic drizzle, Morroccan Zing (perfect with some Camembert Cheese), lemon-infused olive oil and olive tapenade to name but a few, it was a foodies feast.

This is a South African wine festival worth adding to the diary for 2011, so keep an eye on the official Cellar Rats Spring Wine Festival page for updates for next year’s festival.