L'Avenir Country Lodge

We were in Stellenbosch for a wedding at Molenvliet, and the case of L'Avenir's wine we shipped home says something about the three nights around it. The lodge stands on a working wine estate on Klapmuts Road, the R44, a few minutes from Stellenbosch, in a valley below the Simonsberg, with rows of vines running out to the mountains: a superb setting, we thought. The estate's buildings are painted white brick, one of them with a gable of black-framed glass and a tall black flue, and in front a timber deck laid in curves, with strips of glass set into the boards.

Of the three kinds of room, we had a Classic first and then an Icon, and it was the Icon we loved, so that is the one to ask for. One bedroom has sliding glass doors on to a lawn under trees, with a leather armchair beside them and a cowhide on the dark wood floor.

The pool is long, with a rim-flow edge looking out over the lakes and white-cushioned loungers along a timber deck under grey parasols. We had a bottle of the estate's own rosé out there, with the lakes beyond the edge of the pool, and nothing about it needed improving. L'Avenir makes its rosé from Pinotage, the wine the estate says put it on the global wine map, so the bottle was the house speciality in a lighter colour.

There is no restaurant on site, but the people here, who were fantastic, will rustle up a charcuterie plate of local delicacies. Breakfast is home-cooked and served on the deck, and reviewers call it excellent. For the lodge's guests, tasting is complimentary at the cellar door, which pours the estate's wines in three tiers; among them is a Single Block Chenin Blanc from a vineyard planted in 1971.

Nothing at the lodge is laid on for children, and the exercise seems designed to make room for more wine: mountain-bike and trail-running paths run through the vineyards, and reviewers mention the walks among the vines. Indoors there is a fireplace, kept, the lodge says, for Pinotage on winter afternoons. March belongs to the rosé.