Wines of the New South Africa. Tim James
to evade this particular problem was to pick the grapes before they were ripe enough to please the birds, with depressing effects on the wine made from them.
By the time van Riebeeck left, the principal vine plantings were no longer in the original company garden. An initial farm on flat coastal land nearby was too battered by wind, and in winter the lake overflowed and drowned the vines. The settlers established a new substantial farm farther down the peninsula and allotted an area to vines. The commander clearly had leanings that would have appealed to biodynamic viticulturists three centuries later: he recorded in August 1658 that he, “with the aid of certain free burghers and some slaves, took the opportunity as the moon waned of planting a large part of Bosheuvel with young rooted vines and cuttings.”
That is a significant account for other reasons than its reference to lunar influences, however, with its allusions to the labor of free burghers and slaves—the forces by which the wine industry was established. The free burghers were former Dutch East India Company servants granted land, along with rations and tools to be later paid for in wheat, in an attempt to stimulate agriculture and reduce expenditure. Initially, private farming was little concerned with wine—meat and grain were the pressing needs of the company—but Bosheuvel was soon bought by a free burgher and became as viticulturally significant as Rustenberg, the company farm at Rondebosch. Soon more free burghers were developing small vineyards; by 1686 production of some 80 leaguers was recorded as originating from them, compared with a quarter as much from Rustenberg. (The leaguer was 152 Dutch gallons, equal to nearly 127 Imperial gallons; about 577 liters.)
Although colonization was not the company’s original intention, the Dutch (and many German) free burghers were already providing the basis for the later colonial conquest of the land, and settlement on the grazing and hunting grounds of the Khoisan provoked a first war (1658–1660). The Khoikhoi (“Hottentots” to the Dutch), according to the now customary analytical division of the indigenous people of these parts, were herders of cattle and sheep; the San (“Bushmen”) were hunters, with no herds. The boundaries between the two groups were flexible and complex, however, and the academic portmanteau word Khoisan reflects this.
The settlement was expanding physically, as the free white population grew and the company, always driven by the logic of its account books and now also partly by concern that the warring English might try to capture the Cape, transferred more agricultural production to private farmers. It was looking increasingly like a nascent colony more than a mere victualing station. To supply the farmers with labor, more slaves were imported, from the East or from elsewhere in Africa. The local people were not enslaved but did increasingly get pressed into service as their land was appropriated and their traditional ways of life became impossible, and any resistance was crushed. In the year the first wine was pressed, there were already 187 slaves—outnumbering the total of soldiers, company officials, and burghers—and their numbers would grow until the end to the sorry business in 1834.
Resistance from the indigenous people delayed expansion into the hinterland, but the need for more grain and meat was imperative. After a period of apparently lackluster leadership in the Cape, the commander who arrived in 1679 accomplished more, and was to have great influence on the development of the Cape’s wine industry. Within weeks of his arrival, Simon van der Stel (he subsequently became the Cape’s first governor) had initiated a settlement in the valley on the other side of the dreary, sandy Cape Flats, and thirty families were living in the Stellenbosch area by 1683. Another settlement was founded at De Paarl on the banks of the Berg River in 1687. Soon agriculture outside the Cape, as the area roughly comprising the Cape Peninsula was generally called, provided the larger part of production, including of wine. Plantings of vines increased rapidly, to a million and a quarter before the end of the century—too many altogether, thought van der Stel: “On account of the vine flourishing here so well, many persons are inclined to neglect other farming and to plant large vineyards.”
A notable addition to the farming community came during the few years after 1688, in the form of Huguenots who fled French Catholic persecution and were offered assistance as emigrants by the Dutch East India Company. Only about two hundred ventured so far south. They constituted about an eighth of the colony’s white population and have left an enduring social legacy in the Afrikaner population, but their contribution to wine culture has often been overrated. While some had worked as vineyard laborers, there is no evidence that more than (at best) a few had the winemaking skills that van der Stel had hoped for. Most of them were settled, interspersed among the Dutch, in the inland Drakenstein area: they named the upper end of the Drakenstein valley Le Quartier Français, the French Quarter, but within a generation the name changed to Fransche Hoek (now Franschhoek), reflecting the settlers’ rapid absorption into the dominant culture. As their recent historian Eric Bolsmann notes drily, despite many romantic claims and assumptions about their role in the development of a winemaking culture, “details of their specific contributions are conspicuously lacking.”
While keeping in mind that the objective for the settlement at the Cape was not to build a major wine industry, the governor took account of the growing significance of wine to the little society and its economy. He encouraged the use of new varieties, and perhaps introduced the Pontac and Muscat de Frontignan that were going to be important in his personal adventure in wine; he imposed some controls over sales (again, the company’s interests, needs, and revenues were paramount); and he attempted to improve quality. He had long found local wine to be “exceptionally harsh,” and was aware that slovenly and ignorant practices in vineyard and cellar were to blame. He tried to do something about the problem of lack of ripeness at harvest; a committee was established to visit wineries and ascertain that the grapes were adequately ripe before they were pressed.
Early exports had already foundered because of poor quality. The first tiny export seems to have been to Batavia in 1679, and some samples also braved the journey back to Amsterdam, where the Lords Seventeen found it “not bad,” but expensive in comparison with Canary and Spanish wine. But there were complaints from Holland and Batavia, and in 1688 the Cape was told firmly not to send any more. If exports were not going to supply the company with income, however, sales at home were starting to do so, through licenses, taxes, and excise duties. English buccaneer and author William Dampier was pleased to find in the 1690s, “The country is of late so well stocked with Vineyards that they make abundance of Wine of which they have enough and to spare, and do sell great quantities to Ships that touch here.” The no doubt more respectable Reverend J. Ovington noted in 1696 that an “exorbitant Fine upon the Tavern and Tipling Houses makes them exact extravagant Rates from the Guests that drink the Liquor.”
Van der Stel’s most significant contribution to winegrowing was the tradition of excellence he established at the large estate he was granted, called Constantia. Even today the past of Constantia is important to the present, something that the industry as a whole can invoke with pride—and relief, for without Constantia, the older history of South African wine would be a much more depressing story. The land there was transformed into a flourishing farm through its owner’s “salutary zeal” and, one must presume, even more so through the zeal of his many slaves; farm buildings, slave quarters, and a house were built; the vineyard was larger and more carefully planted and tended than any other in the Cape at the time. By 1700, the year after he retired to live at Constantia, further additions and grants had given him a virtual empire in the Cape Peninsula, where he farmed wheat and cattle on a large scale, as well as vines. The “Governor’s wine,” made in the sweet, liquorous style then most in demand, soon established a reputation for excellence in the Cape and even beyond, first in Batavia (where it was found that “the wine from Constantia is of a much higher quality than any sent out so far”) and Holland, and then farther afield. Numerous accounts survive of more or less distinguished visitors to the Cape, who frequently called in at the principal estates. French traveler François Valentijn visited first in 1705, and gave “principal praise and honour” to van der Stel and his son (at Vergelegen) “since, although before their times there were already vines here, and wine had already been pressed, it is certain that the old Heer van der Stel brought to his outstanding country estate many sorts of vine stocks from Germany and elsewhere, previously unknown here; also that until now there is no wine to be compared to the red Constantia wine.”
This is perhaps the place to note that in fact,