WMBW Travels – Rico Suter Country House

Here we go! My first actual proper ‘travel” post. Wish me luck.

A couple of weeks ago, with valentines approaching, Elzaan and I decided we wanted to get out of town for a little romantic get away. We both wanted something “rustic” where we could sit and stare into nature with a glass of wine (or bottle) in our hands. We love to cook and wanted that to be part of the experience, so staying in a hotel wasn’t an option – they get funny about you using the kitchen without permission. Lastly, we didn’t want to drive for hours to get there, it was only going to be 2 nights so we wanted to make the time count.

After a little bit of research, we stumbled on to this place, the Rico Suter Country House. It seemed perfect. 

It sits somewhere between Ceres and Worcester, about an hour and half out of Cape Town. The farm itself is a working wine and fruit farm and you pretty much stay on the top floor of the farmers house. No not in the attic, its not that rustic, but in a double volume space with beautiful open truss ceilings and views for days.

Seriously, if you go for nothing else, go for the incredible, incredible views. Our sunset on the first day was so epic we nearly spilt our G&T’s (calm down I said ‘nearly’). We’re also pretty sure that Saturdays sunset was as epic, but we were napping so who knows – something about farm life and naps! If its good enough for the farm dogs (of which there are 2) its good enough for me.

Anyway, I digress.

We arrived and were greeted by Erika (the farmers wife), She quickly showed us around, told us a little about the farm and what they do, then left us to our own devices after bringing us some Rico Suter wines to sample. We sat on the balcony and watched the sun set against the mountains and over the vineyards. It truly was epic.

I know that all I’m showing is scenery here, but you can get proper pics of the place on their website. I’m not a big ‘outdoorsy’, nature kinda guy, but I just couldn’t stop staring into this view! It’s totally postcard like!

Every room opens up on to the view, so you never miss it and are always overwhelmed, everywhere from the bathroom to the lounge looks over the vineyard with a mountain backdrop. So of course its no surprise that we chose to move our dining room table out on to the balcony for dinner. The kitchen isn’t incredibly well equipped, but I guess that’s relative to what it is you’re cooking. There is convection oven / microwave, one hotplate and an electric frying pan with a few pots and pans. For us it was perfect, we came well prepared and we pretty much cooked all our meals in the electric frying pan which is pretty awesome.

You can however get Erika to prepare meals for you if you (at an extra charge of course) so we thought we would get her to do breakfast on Saturday morning, and we could sleep in. The breakfast was amazing, a fresh fruit salad with muesli and yogurt, home made bread and pastries as well as all the ingredients for an omelette, finely chopped, sliced and ready to go. If you visit, I strongly suggest taking this option, its super worth it and everything is delicious and plentifull.

The rest of our stay was spent relaxing, snoozing, listening to music, drinking champagne, drinking champagne, drinking champagne. Eating, relaxing…etc etc

There is a fair amount to do in the area, or even on the farm if you like. They have two dams for swimming, mountain bike and hiking trails and of course all the surrounding wine farms for lunches and tastings. You can even get involved in the farm, see how it runs, help out during the harvest, it’s all really up to you. We did very little of it, mostly because of the afore mentioned relaxing and champagne, though I suspect if we had more time we would of gone exploring

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If it is absolute peace and quite that you want, this is the place for you. I cant say it enough, come for the views alone! The Breede River Valley really is a beautiful part of the world. This place is also incredibly well priced given the size and facilities, we paid R980 ($84) for the first night with breakfast in the morning and R800 ($64) on the second night with no breakfast. These prices are for the room, not per person.

If you missed the link above, you can get all the details for the Rico Suter Country House here. If you decide to go, I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Okay. Stay fancy

Oh, if you have any questions or remarks, leave me a question or comment below and I’ll try and answer it.