Two cases of wine. That's the only remuneration 82-year-old Marita Bailey requested when La Motte Wine Estate asked whether they could name their new range of wines after her father, iconic South African artist Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef.

"Marita lives in England and corresponded with us via handwritten letters sent from her neighbour's fax machine," says La Motte cellar master Edmund Terblanche with a smile.

We're sitting in the estate's modern tasting room where Edmund has just treated me to a sampling of the wines in the Pierneef Collection, which comprises an organically grown sauvignon blanc, a shiraz viognier and a shiraz grenache. The labels are embossed with Pierneef's immediately recognisable black-and-white linocuts, the originals of which are gracing the walls behind us.

If my knowledge of wine wasn’t so pedestrian, I would like to imagine that I'd be able to draw a number of parallel characteristics between the prints and the wines – balanced composition, stylistic elegance, complexity – but, novice that I am, I'll just venture to say that the artful execution is unmistakable in both cases.

For the pièce-de-resistance, Edmund opens a bottle of the flagship Hanneli R, named after La Motte owner and acclaimed mezzo-soprano Hanneli Rupert, daughter of the late Anton Rupert.

"The wine was released with the opening of the estate's restaurant, Pierneef à La Motte," says Edmund. "Because we named it after Hanneli, the wine needed to be feminine and accessible, but also have a strong backbone and be able to develop a deeper complexity over the years. On the day of its launch, someone described it as 'a boxing punch in a velvet glove'. I think that sums it up perfectly."

Shortly before lunch, Hein Koegelenberg, La Motte's managing director and Hanneli’s husband, takes me on a tour of the gallery, a beautiful, cavernous space that is home to modern South African works from Stellenbosch's Rupert Gallery and an entire room dedicated to Pierneef's art. Exhibited chronologically, the collection, which formerly belonged to Marita, includes rare sketches, guache works and watercolours, as well as the great master's easel and paintbrushes. It's all a real treat for an art nerd like me, and I become increasingly excited about seeing how Pierneef's presence will be felt in his eponymous restaurant, Pierneef à La Motte.

Entering the restaurant via a grassy, oak-shaded courtyard, I spy chef Chris Erasmus standing in the slick industrial kitchen neatly arranging one last shiraz-salted chip on a plate holding a sinfully good-looking piece of sirloin. No, I didn't go though the wrong door, the open-plan kitchen is designed to be one of the main focal points of the restaurant and is set to become a TV kitchen in the near future.

The rest of the restaurant, a vast airy space with a wood-beamed pitched ceiling, is dominated by three chandeliers of dangling crockery, patterned with meticulously reproduced designs harking back to the VOC days.

The crockery clusters create a soothing wind-chime-like sound as I sit down for lunch with Edmund and his wife Hetta.

"We call our style of cooking Cape Winelands cuisine, because it is based on the food the Dutch and Huguenot settlers ate when they first came to the Cape," explains Hetta, creator of the culinary concept behind the menu. "We scoured cooking literature, such as 16^th-century chef Thomas van der Noot's series of cookbooks, and reinterpreted the dishes in a modern way."

"The Huguenot fish pie, for example, was originally made with salmon, caviar and truffles," continues Hetta, "but because none of these ingredients were readily available, they improvised, and adapted the dish with snoek roe and field mushrooms."

Chris's artistic rendering of the original – which I observe on Hetta's plate – would certainly make Pierneef proud: four neatly stacked blocks of hake roe, porcini mushrooms, spiced rice and artichokes, neatly encased in a flaky pastry.

After a bite, I almost have order envy, but that’s before I taste my own choice of boerbok meat, presented in a triangular terrine with dots of turnip purée and apple and sultana chutney. I'm equally enamoured with my main course of smoked lamb rib with pickled tongue and dried pear dumplings, or "soutribbetjies met kluitjies" as it's colloquially known.

Over a dessert of apple pie and milk tart ice cream, I page through the opulent, book-bound menu again. The title page features an endearing photo of Pierneef holding a tiny Marita on his hip. The image has been reproduced and printed on the backs of the restaurant's chairs. From a myriad vantage points, the two seem to be keeping a permanent watch over the goings on. They look content.

By Annette Klinger