Wines of the New South Africa. Tim James
for their poor quality was, unsurprisingly, disputed. A few perceptive observers noted viticultural problems, while “slovenly” winemaking was frequently cited; many noticed wine farmers picking unripe grapes and including leaves, earth, and rotten grapes, allowing the wine to ferment at too high a temperature, the misuse of sulfur, dirty casks (there seems to have often been a severe shortage of suitable containers, many of which might have been used for highly unsuitable contents in their journey to the colony)—and, above all, a general dirtiness. But if the wine farmers were negligent, and frequently excoriated by the Cape Town dealers who took in most of the colony’s wine production, many implicated the dealers, too. One commentator spoke of them as treating the wines they purchased from farmers “as raw materials, to be altered and fashioned according to their own taste and judgement. An injudicious tampering with it has deteriorated instead of improving the commodity.” Furthermore, it was rather convincingly suggested, “the wine boers were encouraged to make the greatest possible quantity of wine, with entire disregard for its quality.” Dealers in England did not go unblamed either, as many travelers noted that Cape wine tasted better in its land of origin, and ascribed this to “altering and fashioning” in London more than to the sea voyage between the two places.
Generally, however, it was clear that the primary need was to improve winemaking techniques. Many attempts were made by government as well as private individuals and bodies to improve matters. Farmers were offered information through newspaper articles, pamphlets, and handbooks about the best viticultural and winemaking methods; Governor Cradock promised “premiums and rewards . . . for the production of the best Wines,” and established an office of Wine Taster intended to control the quality of wine bound for export. Regulations attempted to ensure that wines were sufficiently aged, and suchlike. A Cape Wine Trade Committee representing growers, manufacturers, and merchants was established in 1826 in the wake of the export market’s collapse. Unfortunately, because of the structural impediments for most farmers of a lack of capital and a lack of price incentive, all these attempts proved futile. Most Cape wine—and even more, Cape brandy—remained “damnable poor stuff.”
Accounts of winemaking at the Cape right up to the end of the nineteenth century seem to indicate a fairly standard approach—probably the most significant difference would be the state of the grapes when picked, the cleanliness of the cellar, and the state of the casks used for fermenting and maturing the wine. Otto Mentzel, a German resident in the Cape in the 1830s, describes the standard means of pressing: “A ‘balie’ or barrel, (usually a leaguer cask cut in two) which is pierced at the bottom and along the sides with many holes made with an half-inch drill, stands on a trestle in a second larger barrel, without holes except for a bunghole, through which the must that is trodden out, passes into a pail or barrel placed beneath it. A slave stands in the perforated barrel, holds onto a short piece of rope stretched above him, and treads the grapes with which it is filled with bare feet.” Carl Thunberg, traveling in the Cape in the 1770s, also observed this basic process, adding, “the must that runs out is put into large high vessels to ferment.” Then “the trodden grapes, before they are farther pressed, are put, stalks and all, upon a coarse strainer (or the bottom of a bed) made of rattans, on which they rub the fruit with their hands, till the husks go through it, the stalks in the meantime remaining behind, which are now separated and thrown away, as they are supposed to make the wine austere and bitter. The husks are then put into the fermenting-vessel, which the next morning is in full fermentation.”
Rather more horrified, Baron Carl von Babo, the government viticulturist toward the end of the nineteenth century and a passionate advocate of improved winemaking methods, spoke in a government report of “a number of half-naked coloured men” trampling the grapes with feet carrying “acetous germs” from the wine-splashed floor, not to mention dirt and sweat: “Although this does not perceptibly increase the quantity,” Babo noted, “it certainly imparts a most objectionable bouquet to the wine.” He added, “Juice, husks and stalks are thrown together into the fermenting tubs, and the astringent harsh tannin is thus extracted.”
Making the best red wine, Mentzel suggested, requires removing the stems before the grapes are crushed, after which “they are left in this state in a vessel for four or five days without further treatment, so that the whole mixture may ferment for a while with the husks. . . . [Then] it is pressed out again with a press.” Mentzel described the wines being repeatedly racked into further barrels. Tubs were often painted with lime, Babo said, giving the wine “that flat, insipid taste of acetate of lime”; or else they were simply so dirty and tainted that there was a good chance of the wine “turning bad the first year.” Finally, as per Mentzel, the “tightly corked” barrel is “left undisturbed for a few weeks, when it may be sold or transferred to smaller barrels for personal use.”
For white wine, Mentzel observed, “The new must is now poured into a barrel impregnated with sulphur. . . . Fermentation is in full swing the very next day and if the wine is desired mellow and sweet, it should soon be drawn off into a newly-sulphurated barrel, which process could continue daily until the wine quietens down. . . . Every second or third day all wines are drawn off and poured into other newly-sulphured vessels. . . . When the wine has been . . . drawn off and settled it is left undisturbed for a few weeks.”
Through all the time of boom and bust in the wine trade, however, the wines of Constantia were locally and internationally praised and sought after (until suddenly Constantia went bust too)—showing perhaps that, with adequate capital resources and labor and with the attention to detail prompted by ambition and encouraged by high prices, the Cape could make fine wine. Some outline of Constantia’s story is important to complete the sketch of a turbulent time for Cape winemaking. Through the eighteenth century, Constantia had built on the reputation established during the earlier period of Simon van der Stel’s ownership, before the property was divided. From the 1770s—after a few decades in which quality had perhaps slipped somewhat—it acquired further international luster, with Groot Constantia now in the hands of Hendrik Cloete. There are numerous accounts by eminent visitors telling of the vineyards and the winemaking cellar, and noting the great care taken in the production of the famous wines.
The larger part of the production of the Constantia farms went abroad to the ruling classes of Europe, and famously, for a time, to the emperor gloomily exiled on Saint Helena, while the victor of Waterloo stocked his Apsley House cellar with the same liquor. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when production of Constantia wine generally varied between 20 and 30 leaguers (out of a Cape total of, say, 16,000 leaguers), the value of its exports was 3 percent to 6 percent of the total value of the colony’s wine exports. Perhaps, as for so many cult wines today, the price was inflated, and there are occasional accounts of wine lovers asserting the equal merits of some other wines. John Barrow, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, claimed that at some farms in Drakenstein, “Muscadel” was pressed into wine “equally good, if not superior, to the Constantia, though sold at one-sixth part of the price; of such importance is name.”
But Constantia did have the name, and had earned it. The wines—the four most important being a white and a red, a Muscat de Frontignan, and a Pontac—were of a sweet and unfortified style increasingly rare in the Cape, as British tastes turned drier through the nineteenth century. The general collapse of prices after 1825 affected Constantia wines comparatively little. But their fashionability in Europe was declining, and it seems that this, combined with the reduction in size of the important farms through deletions and with comparatively high labor costs, contributed to financial crises by the 1870s. When Jacob Cloete of Groot Constantia died in 1875, the estate was insolvent. Commentators, even Jose Burman, the meticulous historian of Constantia, seem at a loss to explain the sudden decline of the most prosperous and prestigious of the Cape’s winegrowing regions. It was certainly not, as Burman suggests, the scourge of phylloxera that made “Groot Constantia’s future look bleak,” for phylloxera arrived there only at the very end of the century. Clearly there was an inability to adjust to the new realities that forced themselves on the wine industry in the last decades of the century.
Whatever the causes, the sudden and precipitous decline of Constantia marked the end of an era. Fortunately for the sake of the birth of a new one, the government bought Groot Constantia in 1885. A model and experimental farm was envisaged, along with a training school