Take a pinch of Chef’s Table, add a dash of Gordon Ramsey’s Unchartered, then a large dollop of Mzansi magic, and you have the quintessential ingredients for a show like no other.
I’ll Bring The Wine, Nederburg’s innovative new five-part YouTube series gets right under the skin and down to the bone of traditional South African food.
Hosted by well-known chef, food writer and raconteur, Karen Dudley, each episode profiles a celebrated local chef, a traditional South African dish, and of course, a Nederburg wine to pair it with.
Dr Tapiwe Guzha & Karen Dudley (I’ll Bring the Wine Episode 4).
Traversing far-flung corners of the country, from Nederburg’s iconic Paarl wine cellar to Durban’s inner city spice markets, this cooking show is more than, well, just a cooking show. It explores the places, people and heritage behind South African cuisine.
In I’ll Bring The Wine, Dudley rolls up her sleeves and engages with each of five local chefs on their home turf. Watch how old favourites are more than merely refreshed and remixed, but thrillingly reinvented.
Inspired by Nederburg’s Double Barrel Reserve, the show itself does a similar kind of blending by uniting Mzansi’s rich tapestry of people, places and flavours.
“The show is designed to encourage viewers to taste, learn and discover traditional South African dishes expressed in a totally original and modern way,” says global marketing spokesperson Jackie Olivier. “It’s an adventure in flavour, culture and travel, meant to heighten curiosity and ignite an appetite for new stories, new dishes and new wines.”
Diwali (I’ll Bring The Wine Episode 3).
In the first episode, up-an-coming chef Mmabatho Molefe (named Taste magazine’s Chef to Watch in 2020), succeeds in giving classic Nguni cuisine a dramatic contemporary makeover (think chicken feet terrine with onion caviar).
In another episode, highly decorated chef Jackie Cameron, who runs a cookery school in KwaZulu-Natal, finds the balance by cooking a tongue slowly, over a day-and-a-half.
Other chefs include “Spicepreneur” Pashi Reddy of My Kitchen Rules fame and Dr Tapiwa Guzha, a Zimbabwean molecular biologist, who uses traditional ingredients like blackjack, sorghum, millet, edible clay, hibiscus and baobab.
The fifth chef is Annatjie Reynolds, hailed as the Karoo Venison Queen. Famous for breaking down an impala carcass in just three minutes, she loves nothing more than to share her know-how.
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- Chicken feet, episode 1
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- Karen Dudley & Mmabatho Molefe, episode 1
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- Mmabatho Molefe, Modern Zulu, episode 1
For Karen Dudley, I’ll Bring The Wine has been the “time to step outside of categories and definitions and celebrate everything we have here in South Africa. I believe that delicious always wins. We have to open ourselves to what is right here in front of us, on our doorsteps. Feel it, enjoy it, and incorporate it into our lives – preserving, not wasting, using what we have and tasting the provenance of our vineyards.”
Subscribe and follow this journey of discovery on Nederburg’s YouTube channel. Be sure to linger longer with each episode release, starting on 22 November and concluding on 20 December.
WATCH the trailer below:
Join the conversation on social media, using the hashtags #IllBringTheWine #LocalFlavours and #NederburgWine.
