Robertson Slow Festival review

A few years ago I used to really enjoy the Wacky Wine Weekend in Robertson, in fact you can read one of my rave reviews here. However, it started to become very crowded and the last couple of years I have given it a skip as it’s too crowded for me. I do like Robertson though and have been keen to check out some of their other festivals. They have the Wine on the River festival in October and the Slow Festival in August, which are both much less busy.

When I received an invitation from the PR agency for the valley to come and experience the Slow Festival, I jumped at the opportunity. A weekend away and I don’t have to organise anything, amazing! So they organised accommodation for us and put together a schedule of events to keep us busy for the weekend. We left Cape Town on Friday afternoon and arrived at our guest house in McGregor without much ado. It’s less than 2 hours from Cape Town.

We were booked into the Green Gables Country Inn, also known now as the Old Mill Lodge (new owners). I was a little disappointed that we had to stay in McGregor when all the action was in Robertson but once we saw the place we staying at, we were quite happy. The Green Gables Country Inn is an awesome little spot. They have a restaurant and a bar which appear to be quite popular, but we didn’t eat there as we were booked in at a restaurant in town. We love how the place is decorated, and the room was very comfortable with an awesome shower.

We freshened up and headed into town (a 47 second drive) for dinner at Karoux. It was a lovely dinner, which you can read about in my review here. Then we made the ‘long’ trip back to the guesthouse (if we had known how close it was, we would have walked, apparently it’s very safe) and hit the sack.

The next day we got up earlyish to check out the teeny weeny McGregor Market. We took a little stroll down the road and found the market without any difficulty. The market is small but there is quite a selection of things on offer: Breads, seeds, preserves, veggies and things to eat straight away. We did a little browsing but didn’t end up buying anything. Seeing all the food did make us hungry so we headed back to the guesthouse for breakfast. It was an awesome breakfast, with memorable poached eggs. I even took a picture, isn’t that egg looking good?

After breakfast we headed to Wederom wine estate to learn about cutting up a pig with Lorenzo from La Masseria. Read about the rest of our visit to the Robertson Slow festival in part two, coming soon.