Twenty years guiding this peninsula, forty in the Cape wine industry, and an operator who has sat on your side of the desk.

Sam grew up in South Africa and took his guiding qualifications young, which put him in the field a good decade before most people in this industry get there. Over seven years he led trips across Zambia, Zimbabwe and a long stretch of Botswana that he still talks about more than is strictly reasonable. He has a dozen solo paragliding flights to his name, an advanced diving qualification, and one afternoon off Aliwal Shoal swimming with ragged-tooth sharks that he describes as the calmest he has ever been in the water.

He then spent the better part of a decade writing about travel rather than running it, for the Sunday Times among others, on press trips to Mauritius, Réunion and Utah, and as the co-founder of a resource site for travel editors and brands. It is a useful apprenticeship for this job. Ten years of being shown around by other people's guides teaches you very quickly what separates a good operator from an expensive one.

Most recently he ran the finance and operations side of a company building high-end expedition travel, and hosted a number of its trips himself: family adventures in Bhutan, conservation work in Kenya, private-lodge weeks in Norway. That is where the unglamorous half of Escapeades comes from: the contracting, the insurance, the licensing, the phone that gets answered. It is also why the company works for operators rather than for travellers. He has been on the operator side of that relationship and knows what a good ground handler is worth.

Sam owns and runs Escapeades. He costs the proposals, contracts every supplier and answers your email, and he takes the view that the itinerary is the easy part. Everything your clients never see is what decides whether their week works, and whether you hear about it afterwards.

Angie has been guiding the Cape for two decades, most of it running her own small day-tour company out of Cape Town: wine farms in the Stellenbosch and Franschhoek valleys, whale watching along the Overberg coast, and the long walks around Cape Point that most operators drive past. She has taken several thousand visitors down that peninsula and she still checks the wind before she decides which way round to do it.

What she is unusually good at is reading a group. Which family needs an early lunch and which one wants to keep going. When a guest who said they wanted the full day has quietly had enough. Which of the two viewpoints to skip so that the third one lands. It is not a skill that appears on a certificate and it is the difference between a competent day out and one people talk about at home.

She is also, and this matters more than it should have to, a woman guiding in an industry that is overwhelmingly male. Plenty of the families we host are travelling with daughters, and plenty of the couples are wives who were talked into the trip. Angie is often the reason they stop humouring it by lunchtime on day one.

She is Sam's mother, which is how this company came to exist, and she guides most of our Cape Town and Winelands days alongside Fred.

Fred spent forty years in the South African wine industry before he ever took a guest down a cellar as a guide. That is the whole of his advantage and it is not a small one. He was working in these valleys through the years when Cape wine went from a domestic curiosity to something the rest of the world takes seriously, and he knows the people who made that happen because he worked alongside them.

The practical effect is that a tasting with Fred is a different thing. He can tell you why a particular slope is planted to cabernet rather than chenin, what the 2015 and 2017 vintages did to the reds and why some estates still trade on them, and which of the winemakers pouring for you has just changed jobs. When we say we can get your clients a cellar visit rather than a counter, a good deal of that is Fred picking up the phone to somebody he has known for thirty years.

For the past ten years he has guided alongside Angie, who is his partner, and between them they run most of our Cape Town, Winelands and Overberg days. He is the one to ask if you want to understand what is in the glass rather than simply enjoy it, and he is also perfectly happy if you would rather just enjoy it.

TODO: Fred's specific roles and the estates he worked with, once confirmed. Those details are the most credible thing on this page and worth naming precisely.