Tasting Room That Replaced Our Corner Café

I have lived on this wine route for twenty years and I would like to speak frankly about the tasting room that replaced our corner café

There was a time, not so long ago, when you could walk down Main Road on a Saturday morning and pick up a loaf of bread, a litre of milk and a copy of the weekend paper from the café on the corner. The owner knew your name. His dog slept under the counter. Change came back in your hand, not on a little wooden tray with a sprig of rosemary.

That café is gone now. In its place stands a “tasting experience destination” — I am reading directly from the sign — offering what the brochure describes as a curated journey through the valley’s terroir, bookable in three tiers: Discovery, Connoisseur and, for those who feel the first two lack sufficient gravitas, Luminary. I have lived on this wine route for twenty years. I grow tomatoes in my garden. I do not feel like a Luminary on a Tuesday afternoon when I simply want somewhere to sit with a decent cup of coffee.

I bear no ill will toward wine. I have consumed a great deal of it, particularly during the years when the children were small. What I object to is the quiet replacement of ordinary, useful, unglamorous community life with an industry that requires advance booking, a willingness to engage with the phrase “flavour journey,” and, on one recent occasion, a waiver.

The new establishments are beautiful. I will grant them that. The olive wood, the exposed stone, the thoughtfully positioned fynbos. Nobody can say the Instagram photographs are not lovely. But you cannot buy a newspaper in any of them. You cannot sit for longer than your allocated slot. And when I enquired, perfectly politely, whether they sold bread, the young man behind the reclaimed timber counter looked at me as though I had asked for directions to a different century.

Perhaps I had.

A retired teacher, Somerset West