Following its recent Art of Rest experience at The Leonardo Spa, which focused on sound therapy, skincare rituals and slowing down, the group’s second curated event takes a slightly more playful approach to wellness. This time, the emphasis is on indulging the senses, with a little fashion thrown in for good measure.

The afternoon begins with a welcome drink called The Indulgence before guests explore an unusual gin and skincare pairing. Instead of the familiar gin-and-tonic combinations, the experience matches gin with personalised ampoules from German skincare brand BABOR.

For those unfamiliar with ampoules, they’re small, concentrated doses of skincare formulated to address particular skin concerns. How exactly they pair with gin remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a more interesting proposition than the usual spa refreshments.

There will also be bubbles and canapés throughout the afternoon, alongside a fashion installation by South African label ERRE, bringing another creative element to the experience. The event is presented in partnership with BABOR, Thalgo, QMS and ERRE.

“I want our events to mean something to our guests: moments that stay with them long after the last sip,” says Natalia Fernandez, marketing manager at Legacy Balance Spas. “The Art of Indulgence is our second curated experience, designed to delight every sense, and there is much more to come.”

The setting is the DaVinci Spa, located at the DaVinci Hotel on Nelson Mandela Square. Part of the Legacy Balance Spas portfolio, it offers six treatment rooms, a hydro pool, relaxation facilities and a range of facial and body treatments.

The Art of Indulgence runs from 4pm to 7pm on Thursday, November 5, and is an invitation-only event.

WIN A little indulgence, courtesy of Legacy Balance Spas

Fancy a little pampering of your own? Wanted has teamed up with Legacy Balance Spas to give three lucky readers the chance to enjoy some well-deserved indulgence.

The grand prize is a one-night stay for two at The DaVinci Hotel in Sandton, including breakfast and a 60-minute aromatherapy massage for two at DaVinci Spa. The experience also includes a glass of champagne on arrival, access to the spa’s relaxation area, and refreshments and snacks.

Two additional winners will each receive a pair of invitations to The Art of Indulgence on November 5, where they can enjoy the gin and personalised BABOR ampoule pairing, bubbles, canapés and ERRE fashion installation.

To enter, head over to @wantedonlinesa on Instagram, find our giveaway reel and follow the instructions.

Entries close at 5pm SAST on October 29 2026, with winners selected and contacted on October 30.

Terms and conditions

• The competition is open to Johannesburg residents aged 18 or older. Employees of Wanted Magazine and Legacy Balance Spas, their immediate families and anyone directly involved in administering the competition are excluded.
• No purchase is necessary. Entrants must follow @wantedonline and @legacybalancespas, like the giveaway reel and tag someone in the comments. Multiple tags are permitted, but only one entry per person will be counted.
• Three winners will be selected at random, with a maximum of one prize per winner.
• The grand prize includes one night’s accommodation for two at The DaVinci Hotel, breakfast, two 60-minute aromatherapy massages, a glass of champagne on arrival, access to the spa relaxation area, refreshments and snacks.
• The hotel stay and spa treatments must take place on the same date and be redeemed before December 31 2026. Weekends, public holidays and peak periods are excluded. Bookings are subject to availability.
• The two invitation prizes are valid only for The Art of Indulgence on November 5 2026 and cover the experiences and refreshments included in the event programme.
• Transport, additional meals, drinks and personal expenses are excluded unless otherwise specified.
• Prizes are non-transferable, non-exchangeable and cannot be redeemed for cash, subject to applicable law.
• Entries close at 5pm SAST on October 29 2026. Winners will be selected at random on October 30 and contacted via Instagram direct message. An alternative winner may be selected if no response is received within 24 hours.
• Wanted Magazine may amend, postpone or cancel the competition where reasonably necessary, subject to applicable law, and is not responsible for entries lost or delayed due to technical issues beyond its reasonable control.
• Winners’ personal information will be used only for competition administration and prize fulfilment, in accordance with applicable privacy laws.
• This competition is not sponsored, endorsed, administered by or associated with Instagram. By entering, participants release Instagram from responsibility in connection with the competition.

Wanted

The kitchen belongs to Massimo Bottura, widely considered one of Italy’s most celebrated chefs. His three-Michelin-star flagship, Osteria Francescana in Modena, has twice been ranked the world’s best restaurant. Gucci Osteria is his collaboration with the Italian fashion house and earned its own Michelin star less than two years after opening in 2018.

The restaurant sits inside Palazzo Gucci, a 14th-century palazzo on Piazza della Signoria, Florence’s political and Renaissance heart, just a short walk from the Uffizi Gallery. The building also houses the Gucci boutique, a bookstore and the Gucci Storia exhibition. What was once largely a retrospective space celebrating the brand’s archives has been reinvented as a living cultural destination, and a walk through is an experience in itself, tracing the fashion house’s history back to its Florentine roots. You’ll find displays of handbags, scarves and clothes, alongside a boutique where some pieces are bespoke and unavailable elsewhere.

Access to the restaurant for dinner is only possible at dusk, through the eclectic bookshop. It’s worth spending a few hours beforehand soaking up the piazza and wandering through the museum. As evening falls, the bookshop closes and quietly transforms into the restaurant’s entrance.

Historically, an osteria was a simple tavern — somewhere travellers could eat, drink wine and rest; less formal than a ristorante, but a step up from a café or bar. This is no traditional osteria in that sense. It’s a Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant that draws on the warmth and hospitality of an osteria, while operating at a very different level, with gastronomy, design and fashion woven together. Even the dishes on the tasting menu carry cultural references and wordplay.

The space is intimate, with about 50 seats, decorated in the brand’s signature green with playful design touches throughout. Nearly every piece of tableware, from dinner plates to dessert plates and coffee cups, is custom-made by Ginori 1735, the historic Florentine porcelain house owned by Kering, Gucci’s parent company. The crockery patterns fold classic Florentine porcelain craft into Gucci’s herbarium motif — floral and faintly whimsical.

The space isn’t overly sumptuous; rather, it’s gently elegant, with a certain homeliness to it. Some diners dress up, though most don’t seem to. Service is attentive but unobtrusive, with an eye for the smallest details.

Dinner opens with three regional Italian breads, in keeping with the restaurant’s habit of elevating everyday staples: pane guttiau, an ultra-thin, crisp Sardinian bread brushed with olive oil, sea salt and herbs; long, feather-light Piedmontese grissini; and a bouncy, soft Ligurian-Emilian focaccia that melts in the mouth. “I feel sorry for people who don’t eat carbs,” my friend said, reaching for the butter and olive oil.

We began with Dits-Lieux, a champagne my friend, who knows a thing or two about it, declared the best she’d ever tasted. The amuse-bouche arrived in three small elements: a ricotta cannelloni (our favourite of the three); a take on vegetable soup rendered in dark chocolate as an interpretation of Italian espresso; and pralines of dark chocolate and toasted almond, something of a nod to the Italian breakfast — sweet and salty all at once.

Think Green is a salad built from 20 different leaves and greens, from arugula to centocchio, erigeron and begonia. It looks deceptively simple but rewards patience: herbaceous notes surface as you eat. Only afterwards do you recognise that the plate resembles a small meadow lifted from a garden, turning a salad into a meditation on biodiversity, sustainability and Italian agriculture.

Fuori Dalla Norma (“outside the norm”) reinterprets the Sicilian classic Pasta alla Norma, with aubergine, pecorino di fossa and cherry — but without a strand of pasta in sight.

Non Dire Cassata is served on a hand-painted Italian ceramic plate, and it’s a showstopper. Room-temperature spaghetti, lightly sauced, is arranged to look almost like dessert. It draws on one of Sicily’s richest sweets, the cassata, using spaghetti, pistachio and bergamot — a fragrant citrus grown almost exclusively in southern Italy. It’s Bottura’s style distilled: nostalgic and rooted in Italian tradition.

Memories of a Summer in Versilia (zucchini, fennel, tomato dashi) is the creation of the restaurant’s head chef, Takahiko Kondo, who is Japanese by birth but, after years in Italy, has become captivated by the rituals of the Tuscan seaside: long lunches, salt air and fennel growing wild by the beach.

My friend had Fungo! (mushroom, quinoa, salsa verde); we were both on the vegetarian menu, though I strayed for a small, delicious piece of steak. We skipped the formal wine pairing, but a glass of Castello di Monsanto Vigneto Il Poggio Chianti Classico Gran Selezione 2020 complemented the meal beautifully.

Dessert was Orto di Venere (Venus’s Garden), with asparagus, white chocolate and spirulina algae, inspired by the Italian Renaissance and its imagery of gardens. A thin meringue crowns the dessert, while edible flowers and herbs echo the floral motifs of Renaissance painting. Avocado ice cream sits alongside. It’s one of the restaurant’s signature finales and possibly its most photographed dessert, telling a story about Florence, the Renaissance and Botticelli before you’ve taken a single bite.

To finish, we were served piccola pasticceria, the restaurant’s take on petit fours, including miniature sweets such as candied jellies and cantucci.

The Saturday evening of our visit drew an interesting mix of guests: a dressed-up couple in their mid-20s; a mother with two teenage daughters, both understated in appearance; an older fashion-conscious man in casual black with a long ponytail and a younger companion; two men dining together; an older couple; and a glamorous woman in Gucci shoes, sipping wine alone, who had changed into walking shoes by the time she left.

The soundtrack drifted from Serge Gainsbourg to Ain’t No Sunshine, adding another subtle layer to the atmosphere.

Gucci Osteria opened in January 2018 as a collaboration between Bottura and Gucci. It began with a friendship — former Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri, a childhood friend of Bottura, brought him in to build a restaurant inside the newly reimagined Gucci Garden. One friend went on to lead one of the world’s great fashion houses; the other became one of the world’s great chefs. Chef Karime Lopez made history there as the first Mexican woman to earn a Michelin star, an achievement that came within two years of opening; Takahiko Kondo stepped into the role of head chef in 2025.

Bottura is known for taking iconic Italian dishes such as tortellini, lasagna and even a Caesar salad — pulling them apart at the seams and reassembling them in unexpected forms. Many of his dishes read as memories or private jokes turned into food. At Gucci Osteria, his kitchen draws on the influences of wherever his collaborators have trained or travelled, while remaining anchored in Italian technique and the Italian pantry. As he put it when the restaurant opened: “Haute couture and haute cuisine are a recipe made in heaven.”

The restaurant has since expanded to Tokyo and Seoul, though Florence remains the original. It’s one of nine Michelin-starred restaurants in the city for 2026 and holds its own alongside more traditional Tuscan fine dining.

Gucci Osteria does something unusual. It takes the emotion of Tuscan tradition and turns it into a story told through Florence, a fashion house and Bottura. It’s an alchemy that lingers long after the meal is over.

gucciosteria.com

Wanted

Some of what drives the trend is generational. Those aged above 40 still consume regularly. Research published in the UK shows that 23% of those aged 80 or more drink daily; likewise, 33% of those in the 60-80 age group. However, 50% of those in the 18-39 group only consume alcohol on special occasions (and 23% of them are now teetotal).

The reasons for this trend towards abstinence are complex and vary depending on the society, the availability of disposable income and, of course, peer group pressure. Propaganda trumpeting the perceived health benefits of abstinence undoubtedly plays a role: the World Health Organisation (WHO), long in thrall to temperance groups (a big percentage of its funding comes from bodies whose primary aim is prohibitionist) puts out a solid stream of disinformation — selective research cobbled together from aggregated data — claiming that “there is no safe level of alcohol consumption”. That moderate drinkers (as a group) live longer than abstainers (and overimbibers) is disregarded. The long-term objective of the WHO appears to be a blanket ban (along the lines of antitobacco legislation).

Lack of disposable income also plays a role. UK-based research shows that those earning more than £100k annually were more likely to indulge than those with less spare cash. Here the change might really be generational. Gen Z-ers may be battling to pay college debt and accommodation costs: if they need to relax, recreational drugs are readily accessible and often for less money.

Smartphone usage may also have contributed to the way under-35-year-olds interact. Many are less sociable and more withdrawn. Unlike their counterparts from the 1980s, for whom alcohol offered a way of overcoming their anxieties, today’s device addicts can retreat to an inner world — with no need to seek lubricants to break down their inhibitions.

Happily for South African wine producers (who are feeling no less beleaguered than their overseas competitors) our domestic market has proved surprisingly resilient. Yes, it’s down year on year, and trade is tough. But the volume decline is 10%-12%, about half of the numbers being bandied about in overseas markets. Part of the reason for this has been the swing to wine as the “universal beverage” of our new middle class. Studies over the past decade have shown that wine is the most gender-agnostic of alcoholic beverages, meeting the needs of men and women socialising together — as opposed to beer (for men alone) and gin or coolers (when women get together).

Research conducted at WineX last year showed the extent to which wine now occupies center stage for urban middle classes. Interviews with more than 200 of the 3,000 couples who attended either of the two public nights of the show identified an audience with an average age about 40, 50% or more of whom earned more than R40,000 a month. Eighty-eight percent of this group had at least one university degree and 47% of those interviewed were attending their first WineX — suggesting that there’s a real hunger to acquire knowledge of and a familiarity with wine. Most buy from wine stores, though 24% shop at wine farms and a similar percentage go online.

Compare this with France, where wine consumption has dropped by more than 80% since 1945 and more than 60% since the 1970s. The Cape wine industry may be battling tough market conditions, but it’s not yet facing the prospect of annihilation.

Business Day

We recognise the labels and know the prestigious names. We associate champagne with victory, romance, celebration and the finest occasions in life. But how often do we stop to wonder about the stories behind the bottles?

World Champagne Day, celebrated this year on October 23, the fourth Friday of the month, offers an opportunity to look beyond the familiar luxury labels and iconic houses.

Behind the glamorous reputation lies a remarkable history of independence, innovation and unconventional thinking, with some of its most interesting chapters written by remarkable women.

In 1805, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin became a widow at only 27. At the time, women rarely controlled major commercial enterprises, but she chose to lead the family champagne business, building a legacy that extended far beyond the famous yellow label of what would become Veuve Clicquot. She helped transform the clarity and presentation of champagne through innovations such as riddling and pioneered the production of blended rosé champagne.

Perhaps her most remarkable achievement was her refusal to accept the boundaries of her time. And she was not alone. Across generations, women such as Louise Pommery of Champagne Pommery and Lily Bollinger of Bollinger Champagne helped redefine the wine’s style, reputation and place in society.

What united these women was not simply their ability to produce extraordinary champagne, but their determination to do things differently. That spirit of independence remains very much alive in Champagne today.

Champagne is home to some of the world’s most prestigious luxury brands. Their contribution to building its international reputation is undeniable. Yet behind those famous houses lies another story of champagne: one shaped by families who have cultivated the same treasured vineyards for generations, by winemakers who know individual parcels intimately, and by producers whose names may never appear on a billboard or beneath a branded umbrella. These are the independent growers and boutique houses.

Some make champagne from grapes grown primarily in their own vineyards. Others are smaller independent houses, sourcing fruit from carefully chosen sites. Their approaches and styles differ, but many share a desire to express a distinctive identity rather than reproduce a familiar house style.

The result can be wonderfully individual. One champagne might express the chalky precision of the Côte des Blancs, another the generous pinot noir character of the Montagne de Reims. Others reveal the personality of a single village, vineyard or vintage. It is a reminder that champagne is not only one taste, one style or one story, and that its diversity is something to be celebrated.

For decades, luxury was often associated with recognition. The watch everyone knew. The car everyone admired. The label everyone could identify across a crowded room. But there is another kind of luxury.

The quiet confidence of knowing something others have yet to discover. The pleasure of introducing someone to something unexpected. Of sharing secrets and stories. Not necessarily more expensive, but more personal, rooted in an appreciation for the unfamiliar.

Perhaps the real privilege is no longer simply having access to what everybody recognises, but understanding what makes something extraordinary in the first place. Champagne offers countless opportunities for precisely that kind of discovery. Prestige opens the door, but curiosity takes us somewhere more interesting.

Imagine a table on a warm October night. Jacarandas blooming in the distance, their purple blossoms lending colour to the landscape and a floral scent lingering in the air.

A familiar champagne sits alongside a bottle whose label few guests recognise. The familiar name attracts attention first. Then someone opens the second bottle and pours a glass.

Curiosity follows. Where does it come from? How was it discovered, by chance or design? Who runs the estate, and what choices shaped the wine? The conversation turns to its history, its distinctive character and the craft behind it.

Suddenly, the champagne becomes more than something to drink. It becomes something to talk about. Its price matters less than the pleasure of discovery, the taste and the story behind an unexpected find.

Perhaps that is precisely what World Champagne Day should celebrate. Not simply opening another bottle, but opening our curiosity.

Champagne has always celebrated life’s exceptional moments. But its own story is filled with people who made exceptional things possible, often by challenging the conventions of their time. From Madame Clicquot to today’s independent growers, that spirit of individuality continues to shape the region.

This World Champagne Day, perhaps the finest bottle is not necessarily the one whose name we recognise. It might be the one whose story we have yet to discover, offering us a new taste of the extraordinary.

sourceprivee.co.za

• Hervé Delabesse is the founder and CEO (champagne experience officer) at Source Privée.

Wanted

Like its sister restaurant, La Colombe in Constantia, its home sits among vineyards and manicured gardens. But where La Colombe is more about white-tablecloth formality, La Petite Colombe is more relaxed — the tie-optional cousin of fine dining.

There’s a country-elegant sensibility to the space: tiled floors and wide, open rooms give it the feel of a trattoria with a modern-country edge, a legacy of the building’s original plan to house an Italian restaurant. A bar sits at the centre of the room rather than tucked away at the back, giving it a natural place in the flow of the night. The floor-to-ceiling windows, earthy tones and natural wood and stone complete the relaxed, grounded atmosphere.

At the back of the main room, organically shaped niches that once displayed pottery now hold a growing collection of awards, most from Eat Out and the Gourmet Guide — two of the most sought-after accolades on South Africa’s culinary landscape.

Head chef Peter Duncan isn’t chasing a signature ingredient so much as a fusion of cultures, cuisines and styles. Over the past five years, he’s built a kitchen that operates less like a hierarchy and more like a collection of inherited recipes, regional pride and personal history — his own and that of everyone working alongside him.

“It’s about telling our story,” he says. “But it’s also about what the people working under me bring. It’s important that this story is theirs too.”

Duncan grew up in Saron, a small rural town between Tulbagh and Porterville, where fine dining wasn’t something he even knew existed. That changed when a culinary school placed him on an internship under Margot Janse, who was among the pioneers of fine dining in the country, which led him to La Colombe, the flagship restaurant of the group he still cooks for today. Along the way he’s worked with some of the biggest names on the local scene, including James Gaag and Scot Kirton of the La Colombe group.

Duncan describes his approach to food as one of absorption, with a background that stretches from Ireland to the Northern Cape to the Eastern Cape, a dozen bloodlines converging.

He’s also quick to defer to the people around him. His sous chef Chris makes a version of atchar that Duncan admits is better than the Cape Town version he grew up with — so that’s the version that made it onto the menu. The same goes for chakalaka.

Travel reinforced that same instinct. In Spain and South America, Duncan noticed an unguarded pride in what’s actually on the table.

“We tend to put so much pressure on ourselves,” he says, “and forget that what we have is as good as what’s overseas. That should be celebrated more.”

That philosophy shows up in a menu that leans into ingredients most fine-dining rooms shy away from: smoked chicken liver, mopane worms and fish heads.

La Petite Colombe operates within the broader La Colombe group, founded by Kirton and Gaag. Kirton’s standard, Duncan says, is disarmingly simple: it should taste delicious. Gaag, by contrast, approaches food with rigorous technical precision — and Duncan describes chasing that same technical bar as one of his biggest ongoing challenges, alongside a good-natured, competitive rivalry that runs through the whole group.

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Everyone measures themselves against everyone else, he says, but it never curdles into pettiness. If one restaurant in the group spots an idea abroad that doesn’t suit its own menu but might suit a sister restaurant, it is passed along freely.

“We are in competition, but we are one big unit,” Duncan says.

Ask Duncan for his most-requested dishes and two stand out immediately — both pulled from the menu at some point, and both quickly reinstated after guests complained.

The first is simply called “the olive”, born from the Barcelona bar snack known as the gilda: an olive, anchovy, and pepper on a skewer. Duncan’s kitchen blitzes those classic ingredients into a liquid, freezes it in an olive-shaped mould, then dips the frozen centre in cocoa butter so it looks like an olive from the outside and bursts with that same briny, savoury liquid the moment it’s bitten. It’s vegan by design, so every guest can eat it, and it’s been on the menu for nearly five years.

The second is closer to home: a fish head soup built from a dish Duncan’s father — who worked in the fishing industry — grew up eating. It’s the kind of dish made in coloured communities from snoek, kabeljou and other catch that would otherwise go to waste, capable of feeding a family of four for a fraction of the cost of a restaurant meal.

Duncan’s father visited the restaurant in its first year and told him plainly he didn’t understand the “fancy” food or the language used to describe it. That conversation became the fish head soup’s origin story. Duncan took it off the menu once, decided within the year it had been a mistake, and put it back on.

Those same instincts shape the restaurant’s winter menu, which swaps in more affordable, in-season fish — sourced from small-scale fishers via Abalobi — such as silvers or Cape bream, without diluting the storytelling or detail of the full seasonal menu.

As for dinner, guests are first led to an informal lounge area for a glass of bubbly and a snack course — the highlight being a beautifully presented, three-tiered wicker basket of small, flavourful bites. Laid out with red-and-white cloth, it has the feel of a picnic in miniature, with morsels ranging from a salmon bagel to Cape Malay vetkoek. Through the rest of the dinner, portions stay relatively small, but every course packs a punch.

Dinner for us starts with the bread course, which arrives with butter shaped into playful forms, a small, tasty flourish before the meal properly begins.

From there: yellowfin tuna with Kerala and masi served on a raised, transparent plate with garden-fresh greens. A grain course with masala pork and bisque (a delicious tortellini, in my case). Kalamansi with worm salt. Then, before the mains, a colourful tray of grapefruit arrives, from which guests are handed a touch of sorbet to cleanse the palate.

For mains: coal-roasted lamb with harissa and tagine or, for a R650 supplement, Karoo Wagyu with Jerusalem artichoke and truffle.

Dessert is a choice between Emmental, pear and sourdough or sweet mielie, popcorn and miso — we went with the Emmental, presented on a clay plate whose open holes echo the cheese itself.

A sweet trolley follows, offering mini eclairs, a burst of tangerine, or the playful “Tonka bar” – a bite of fudge packaged like a Willy Wonka bar, complete with an edible “golden ticket” tucked inside.

Wine plays an important role throughout, particularly for those who opt for the pairing — Leeu Estates’ own Mullineux label is among the standouts on the list.

Towards the end of dinner, shuttles and Ubers begin arriving to collect guests, several of whom had travelled in from Cape Town for the night. The estate is private, so there’s no option to simply arrive unannounced, but visitors can book a daytime lunch or a wine tasting at Mullineux and take in the estate’s manicured gardens and larger-than-life statues.

La Petite Colombe currently holds three stars from the Eat Out awards, and Duncan is aiming higher. But what drives him most, he says, isn’t the accolades — it’s watching staff who started with nothing go on to own cars, send their kids to better schools, move out of their parents’ homes and start building lives of their own.

“That, for me, makes me happier than any award we can get,” he says. “It shouldn’t get to a point where, as a chef, you compromise your staff’s happiness for it. Then it’s not worth it.”

lacolombe.restaurant/la-petite-colombe

Wanted