When I first moved to Cape Town and thought about Constantia, my mind was filled with images of  botoxed ladies who lunch, old money and a nest of well to-dos in a leafy green valley. I was aware of the historic importance of the valley, but details were scant. Today, botoxed ladies who lunch still wonder about in my imagined view of the valley, but they are all sipping on excellent Sauvignon Blancs, and retire in the evenings with elegant but powerful red blends (and toss their car keys into big bowls at any opportunity). I also took more of an interest in the place when I read that Dickens, Baudelaire, Austen, and Napoleon all drank the sweet wines of Constantia. This fitted in well with one of my personal rules, “If it’s good enough for Baudelaire, it’s good enough for me.”

It is remarkable that we have a wine region that produces such good wines slap bang in the city. Because of this, I highly recommend it for wine trips. I took a bunch of people from Getaway Magazine on a little wine trip around the Constantia region last year, and hot damn! We visited a few Cape Point Vineyards (not quite Constantia, but it’s just around the corner) including Steenberg, Klein Constantia, Buitenwerwachting, and the day was chock full of delicious wines – so full in fact we ended up crashing a botoxed wives’ dress up party wearing sombreros and mustaches late in the evening. That’s another story, but it does remind me of why I really get a kick out of Constantia.

I dig it because it reminds me of The Great Gatsby Era: the unashamedly rich, the hedonistic frivolities, the swingers, the hell raisers, the addicts, fine clothes, expensive wine, and the unspoken rule that appearances have to be kept up. You think it’s a quiet lush and leafy suburb, but behind closed doors the gloves come off, as well as everything else.

This is not unprecedented. In 1913, Abraham Lochner de Villiers and his American millionairess wife, Clara Hussey bought Klein Constantia and started partying like it was nineteen-ninety… no, wait, but you know what I mean. Like Jay Gatsby, they would role out the caviar, peacocks and bands – revelling in their wealth like scrooge McDuck going for a dip. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was South African, he would have set his stories in Constantia.

This weekend the Constantia Fresh Festival is being held on the grounds of Buiitenverwachting and – having attended the festival for the last two years – it’s a similarly a grand affair. The idea of the festival is to celebrate the Constantia valley with a focus on Sauvignon Blanc. The festival runs on 24 and 25 February. The Friday is taken up with a big, focused tasting. This is for the wine nerds and the deep of pocket, with around 40-odd wines from around the world being tasted alongside those from Constantia. This year’s theme is red-blends. The evening sees a slap-up dinner cooked by Peter Templehoff of Cellars Hohenort. These are pricey affairs – tickets are R1500 a pop, but the wines are seriously world-class and are not in short supply.

The Saturday is a more relaxed affair, with the best Sauvignon Blancs in the country being tasted on the lawns of Buitenverwachting. Each region teams up with a top chef who creates mini dishes to pair with the wines. Basically for R400 you get to wander about all day eating and drinking to your hearts content. It’s rad. Later in the afternoon the Constantia producers bring out their red wines to go with the meat from the braai that is put on. A band plays, people lounge on hay bales, drink more wine, and swing like it’s 1929.

But why celebrate Constantia Sauvignon Blanc? In my humble opinion it is one of the areas of the country that consistently produces top quality Sauvignon Blancs with a real sense of place. They taste like Constantia. There is always a specific mineral, green, herbaceous streak that runs through the wine, it’s quite distinct. I chatted to a couple of wine-makers to see if I was talking kak, or if there really is a specific Constantia character that comes out. I popped in to see JD Pretorious, winemaker at Steenberg, and he told me that Constantia Sauvignon Blancs are “minerality focused [with] good natural acidity, they have a herbaceousness, but not a lean and mean green herbaceousness; there is always a herbal element to it. That’s something unique to all the wines in Constantia.”

This has to do with the specific climate that Constantia has, it is generally cooler than many of the other South African wine regions, and well suited to Sauvignon Blanc. Stiaan Cloete, viticulturist at Klein Constantia said that for them temperatures “never reach above 27 degrees on top of the mountain” where their top Sauvignon grapes are grown. The combination of soil type, aspect, and climate of the Constantia Valley combine to produce really stylish Sauvignon Blanc that has the ability to age beautifully.

I’ve tasted the famous 1986 Klein Constantia Sauvignon Blanc a couple of times, and it really is a remarkable, thought provoking wine; a wine that reminds you that drinking all your Sauvignon Blanc in the year it is produced is foolhardy. And if you ask around on Saturday you may get lucky as some producers have been known to keep an older something something under the table.

These sort of events appeal to me, as there is focus. The big wine shows are okay if you have a plan and get there early, before they turn into a big piss-up. Without a plan you can get easily lost in the 100’s of wines and walk away without really learning a thing. Here the focus is on Sauvignon Blanc, and if you go, my advice is to think about how the Constantia Sauvignon Blancs differ in style to the other wines that are there. See if you can pick out a similarity in the wines from Botox Valley. And if that’s too much like work, just drink eat and party as if you are Jay Gatsby. Wear a suit, put on some pearls, and I’ll see you there.

I have been given three sets of double tickets to give away for the Saturday walk around tasting at Buitenverwachting. All you need to do is post in the comments what first comes to your mind when you think of Constantia. We’ll email the winners on Friday morning.

For more details on the event check out the Constantia Fresh website

This week’s edition of Wine Harry and Song on 2oceansvibe Radio on Thursday morning at 10h30 will have us chatting to Laars Maack, owner of Buitenverwachting and Pieter Templehoff, Executive Chef at the Cellars-Hohenort. We’ll also be giving a few tickets away then too.