Food & Wine Market at Hermanuspietersfontein

This is a pop­u­lar mar­ket on a Saturday morn­ing for res­id­ents of Hermanus and the sur­rounds. Its set­ting is the Hermanuspietersfontein Wine Cellars at the Hemel en Aarde Village closest to Onrus, and if you're not there to pick up the weekend's nibbles and nosh, then you're there for break­fast with friends. It's a mar­ket in much the same vein as the Neighbourgoods and the Earth Fair mar­kets in Cape Town, although on a slightly smal­ler scale. It can get busy though, so you might want to get here rel­at­ively early. The mar­ket opens at 09h00 ...

As you enter the gen­er­ous court­yard, its peri­meter under cover and brim­ming over with stall­hold­ers at wooden tables, black boards behind them announ­cing their wares, there is a gen­er­ous aroma of bacon and eggs. On your imme­di­ate right is the Boeremark stall, there from early to sup­ply you with bacon and egg rolls or a farm­ers break­fast. On the morn­ing we arrived (which was our second visit to the mar­ket and the area) they had already stopped selling farm­ers break­fasts, so pop­u­lar are they.

The space is brim­ming with fam­il­ies, con­ver­sa­tion, laughter, wine and good, local food in abund­ance. Hermanuspietersfontein, the ori­ginal name for Hermanus way back in 1855 before it was shortened (thank good­ness, can you ima­gine get­ting that out first thing in the morn­ing?), is the chosen name of a wine cel­lar and brand that uses these premises for wine tast­ing. As part of the Sunday's Glen wine ward the farm was awar­ded cham­pion status by the Biodiversity and Wine Initiative (BWI) last year. The farm lies nestled in the val­ley between the moun­tain­ous area close to Stanford and the Atlantic Ocean.

It's a smart move to use their gen­er­ous court­yard with seat­ing for the weekly mar­ket, as where bet­ter to sell your wine! With food, goes wine. And it's quite a col­lec­tion of local qual­ity food that you'll find here. The cheese stall, run by Gerrie, usu­ally has a bit of a queue, and, all of the cheeses are local in the sense that they're from Cape Town and the sur­round­ing areas.  Gruyere, blue cheese, goats cheese, you name it, it's there, along­side a small but killer col­lec­tion of cured meats – black­forest ham, pan­cetta and copper.

Other stalls include 'eat Greek', which, as its name sug­gests, serves deli­cious Greek foods that include tzatziki, humus, spana­ko­pit­tas and dol­mades; Matt's fish, which had a selec­tion of cob, red roman and kingk­lip – all fresh; a bread stall where an array of hand­made artisan breads are baked by Jenny, whose hus­band Hennie used to do the incred­ible fish stall (it wasn't there on our visit, per­haps Jenny decided breads would be a bet­ter idea?). Jenny described to us how she pre­pares her starters, mostly from wheat, to pro­duce her breads, which sell at mod­est prices when com­pared to the Cape Town markets.

Auntie Gerda con­vinced us to part with our cash very eas­ily. Her assor­ted cakes, small bakes, truffles and cup cakes are delight­ful and deli­cious. My other half will be return­ing simply to acquire more of her mil­lion­aires short­bread! Rita was selling a selec­tion of homemade pies, whilst Jan and Marie served us an amaz­ing pan­cake. That was by no means the sum total of the stalls, there were plenty of oth­ers that included an array of pickles, mus­tards and chut­neys, droë wors, Gerald the cof­fee man, who appar­ently has been known to make 410 cof­fees on demand in 360 minutes, and more.

Also worth a men­tion are the fish cakes which we man­aged to sample. They were simply deli­cious and value for money, but I'm blown if I can remem­ber from which stall they came ...

There were a few char­ac­ters at the mar­ket too, and, if you don't mind the occa­sional warb­ling nas­al­ity of Celine Dion, take a seat, col­lect your good­ies from the stalls around you, and bask off in the atmo­sphere of a large com­munal dining-room, where friends and fam­ily make a 'thing' of Saturday mornings.

When? Every Saturday 09h00 – 13h00
Contact: +27 (0)28 316‑1875

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