Wines of the New South Africa. Tim James
years amounted to about 40 percent of output. At their height they contributed more than half the value of the Cape’s total exports; only in the 1840s did wool become more important. Wine farming, particularly in the arable southwest of the Cape, remained the prime economic activity for some decades.
Grapes, even before the boom years, had been a profitable activity for many farmers. As a group, wine producers were comparatively wealthy members of the colonial population, but inequality among them had (as for all farmers) intensified during the eighteenth century, and this process continued. According to an official list compiled in 1823 there were 374 wine farms in the Cape Town and Stellenbosch-Drakenstein regions, owning three-quarters of the colony’s vines and responsible for 85 percent of its wine production. Mary Rayner, in her study of wine and slaves in the first half of the nineteenth century, calculated that a majority of these were marginal or small producers, with fewer than 69,000 vines; at the other extreme, just thirteen had more than 150,000. In addition to producing absolutely more wine, the larger farms were relatively more efficient, with higher yields per vine.
By the time the wine-export boom was ending, two-thirds of the wine farms were heavily mortgaged, suggesting that the image of wine-farmer prosperity at the time should not be too blandly generalized. William Bird, in his State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, noted that overly enthusiastic planting had led to a production surplus and lower prices—not for the first time or the last in South Africa. A problem farmers faced (and made many complaints about) was an increasing labor shortage—although it should be pointed out that the main sufferers of the shortage were undoubtedly the harder-pressed laborers, the slaves on whom the industry still depended. In the early nineteenth century, owners of wine farms possessed, on average, sixteen slaves. Britain had ceased trading in slaves in 1807, though many were brought into the Cape Colony after that date. Rayner has pointed out that wine farmers “were confronted with a paradoxical situation of being encouraged to raise productivity by a colonial government which, at the same time, had acted to cut off the major source of labour for the wine farms.” As Rayner puts it, “the burden of the wine boom must have been carried by a diminishing number of aging slave men.” No doubt owner-family labor also increased at the time, including child labor. The labor shortage continued, to be made worse by the abolition of slavery in the colony in 1834 (with a four-year transition period thereafter). A contemporary newspaper noted a claim that a farm that might once have had seven or eight male slaves by 1840 might have only one—now a paid laborer, of course.
It was not simply a matter of labor power. P.D. Hahn, discussing the labor shortage in a government report later in the century, noted that “farmers found themselves not only without the usual supply of labour, but also without that thorough practical knowledge of viticulture” embedded in the more skilled slaves. The lives of “free” laborers were very hard too: the British abolition of slavery argued no softness for workers, as the draconian Masters and Servants Act of 1856 made clear. While farmers had to learn to deal with wage labor, massive inequality and by now institutionalized racism continued.
The move away from preferential tariffs in 1825 was a severe blow to the colony’s wine industry. Exports to Britain immediately started falling. The five-year period 1831–1835 saw imports from the Cape just two-thirds of the average for the corresponding years of the 1820s. Some minor new export markets were found, but these did not compensate, nor did they endure. Equally serious, the price of exported wine declined steeply: in 1824 it was approximately £23 per leaguer; after 1839 the average price varied between £9 and £16. Local prices would also have declined. The colonial economy was much impoverished, as were many individuals, and the number of insolvencies rose. Governor Bourke wrote in a letter, “The culture of the vine is not in the increase, the low prices of wines in the last years having caused great discouragement.”
London was implacable. There were repeated (and, as always, perfectly justified) suggestions that quality should be improved—the Cape had, after all, been given a fine opportunity to establish an export market. Murmured the undersecretary of state for the colonies in Manchester School tones: “If the wine trade of the colony cannot be profitably conducted, let it be abandoned, and the capital employed in it diverted into some other channel”—which was rather more easily said than done, when most of the capital was small-scale and heavily mortgaged, and other channels somewhat less than numerous.
There was a sudden sharp increase in exports to Britain in the late 1850s because of oidium-decimated European crops, but that was a temporary respite, and matters became worse still after 1861, when a British trade treaty with France reduced duties on that country’s wines. All supplier countries to Britain were now to be treated equally, with duties being differentiated only on grounds of alcoholic strength—a further blow to the Cape, whose wines were routinely heavily fortified to help them withstand the rigors of the sea voyage to Europe. In 1862, Cape wine exports to Britain were down to 356 leaguers, less than they had been in 1814.
Britain, in the years of preferential tariffs, was taking some three-quarters of the Cape’s wine exports. The absolute total exports sometimes varied as wildly from year to year as did total production. For example, in 1816 total wine production (excluding brandy) was 15,398 leaguers (50 percent more than in the following vintage); total exports were 3,647 leaguers (of which 70 percent went to Britain). In 1823 production was 21,147 leaguers (5,000 more than in the previous year) and exports 7,013 (not much different from the previous year). In the years when exports to Britain were falling, there were renewed attempts to strengthen other markets—including the United States, which was a moderately successful outlet for a time, with an average of 23 leaguers going there annually in the 1835–1854 period. The basic problem, apart from import duty anomalies, seems to have been, as so often, that Cape wine could not compete on a quality level with suppliers from Europe. But in the nineteenth century, Cape wine was exported to a remarkable number of countries (if not consistently), from Jamaica to Australia, and from India to Sweden.
Despite undoubted hardships for many wine farmers, the wine industry somehow more than survived the problems occasioned by falling exports. In 1865 the number of vines was over 55 million (there were 31 million in 1825), and production rose significantly, at least helped by a burgeoning population. An increasing proportion of the surplus was diverted to brandy over the following century. Cape brandy had been, according to an anonymous writer in 1820, “one of the worst and most pernicious spirits ever produced.” Now there were concerted attempts to encourage an improvement, both to make it more widely salable and to make it acceptable for fortifying wine: most dealers with any ambitions for quality used imported French brandy for that purpose. Quantities as well as quality rose: in the twenty-five years before 1860 production nearly quadrupled, to about 4,000 leaguers.
There was less improvement with wine. Authorities and commentators continued to blame and lament the quality of Cape wine (Constantia always excluded) and insist on the desirability of raising standards—an “imperious necessity” Governor Bourke called it. In fact, reading many of the contemporary accounts, one wonders how the stuff ever got sold at all, let alone drunk. In 1824, at the height of exports to England, a Cape newspaper noted, “With regard to Cape Madeira, and the Wines in General of this Colony, it is a fact which is acknowledged by everybody, that nothing is so bad in England as the Wines of the Cape.” Descriptions abound of “miserable trash” that is “villainous,” “execrable,” “filthy,” and so on—with, as well as “an undisguised taste of brandy,” a frequently observed “earthy taste.” Too often and too easily Cape wine “turned sour” in transit and arrived at its export destination undrinkable. A frequently occurring complaint was that Cape wine was sold too young: it would appear that it required at least a year’s maturation, preferably more, before it was palatable.
What were the types of wines being made in the Cape in the first half of the nineteenth century, and why hadn’t quality been improved? Mention has been made of the near monopoly of the vineyards by Greengrape, later identified as Sémillon. As to types of wine, it is impossible to penetrate behind most of the various names and usefully ponder how Cape Malaga, Vintint, Moselle, Hock, and Vin de Graves were discriminated, and how they differed from Cape Madeira. It would seem that a turn from sweet wines at the beginning of the century (Cape Madeira, Steen, and Hanepoot seem to have been sweet) to predominantly dry wines by the middle of the century is ascribable to British taste.