Wines of the New South Africa. Tim James
and 1930s at least. It is symbolic that the lackluster vineyards of Groot Constantia, the onetime focus of a winegrowing effort that had proved the Cape could produce fine wine, were at this stage being leased out to a private producer. The government wine farm, which had actually done some useful experimentation and encouragement of better winemaking methods in the years around the turn of the century, had largely abandoned any pretense of educational usefulness by the time the historic manor house burned down in 1925.
But if quality was discouraged by the system of minimum pricing, production continued to rise implacably, as a ten-year sampling shows (with figures drawn from contemporary issues of Farming in South Africa): in 1919 there were 114,128 leaguers of wine produced; ten years later, 159,722; in 1939, 290,308; in 1949, with farmers no doubt still encouraged by a great demand for brandy during World War II, production was up to 452,879 leaguers. Exports generally—effectively monopolized by the KWV—had grown well during these decades (though insufficiently to match production), largely because of preferential treatment given by Britain to countries of the British Empire, which system had recently been reestablished.
The KWV took another crucial step in 1940 when the Wine and Spirits Control Act—with Parliament again resisting merchants’ objections—extended its control to setting minimum prices also for “good wine” (seldom very good, in fact, but intended for drinking as such rather than for distillation). The whole wine industry was to be covered, and all transactions between merchants and producers were to be monitored by the KWV, which would be the medium for all payments. The act also introduced powers for KWV to impose production limits. A government commission in the mid 1930s had noted clearly that the KWV’s minimum pricing policies led to more wine production, and more wine of lower quality, and that statutory control over all aspects of wine production was necessary—and who better to do this than the KWV itself?
Plantings of vineyards had continued apace. Although lower prices were paid for the volumes that the KWV decided were “surplus,” they were usually sufficient to amply reward the overproducer: the more overproduction, the greater the income. Farmers had, essentially, no responsibility for marketing their produce, they were there to grow grapes; the cooperatives and the KWV were there to sell the wine. There was certainly little incentive for most farmers to improve their viticulture except to make it more productively efficient, and little reason to experiment with new varieties or clones. Quite the opposite in fact, as most funded research into grapevine improvement in the twentieth century in the Cape went into development of clones that gave better yields rather than higher-quality grapes. It was only in the 1960s that there started to be a significant (though still tiny) number of estate owners with real ambitions for their wines. Nonetheless, it is important to note that a few excellent wines were produced even before, as merchants started to develop some premium brands. For example, vintages of Chateau Libertas from as far back as the 1940s, made by the Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery, have been drinking splendidly (the few treasured bottles remaining) seventy years later.
These middle decades of the century saw the start of the wine industry’s major expansion into the inland parts of the country, where warmth and irrigation, generously supported by the offerings of the agrochemical industry, secured heavy yields. It was also the time when the number of cooperatives grew enormously, as farmers needed cellars in which to produce the “good wine” (at standards not incompatible with heavy cropping) that earned a premium over distilling wine—although sometimes the prices for the two were remarkably close, again reducing incentives to quality production. The war years saw the number of cooperatives increase from 6 to 19; by 1950 there were 30, by 1955 there were 46. The introduction of expensive technologies, including cold fermentation, further discouraged the private producer. One of the great names of the time, Zonnebloem, became the property (it seems by means of an unattractive process) of Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery (SFW) when the farm was unable to afford the cost of modernizing its cellar; Zonnebloem became an increasingly dull brand rather than the name of a few fine wines. The need for expensive capital equipment encouraged the move to cooperatives, and by 1975 there were 69.
Cold fermentation—a technology that the KWV had studied in the 1930s but advised the farmers against—was experimented with after the war, notably by N.C. Krone at Twee Jonge Gezellen in Tulbagh, and by an immigrant German family, the Graues, on their farm Nederburg, near Paarl. Nederburg, which started building its reputation during the 1950s, especially after the arrival of Günter Brözel as cellarmaster in 1956, was to become part of SFW in 1966. This was fitting, as it was SFW that made the most spectacular use of the new possibilities brought in by cold fermentation for making fruity white wine in a warm climate. In 1959 SFW launched a semisweet wine, mostly made from Chenin Blanc, named Lieberstein, which was to effect something like a revolution in Cape wine—and the drinking habits of South Africans, more of whom were prompted to turn to wine. It was the first wine to be marketed nationally here, and the huge new domestic market it created meant that by 1964 Lieberstein for a while claimed to be the largest-selling bottled wine in the world. And of course it prompted imitators. The KWV itself built a modern cellar with cold-fermentation facilities in time for the 1962 harvest. Plantings of Chenin Blanc increased hugely, numerous wine cellars were modernized, and the Cape tradition of producing more white wine than red was reinforced.
But overproduction—thanks to a system of rewarding it, and to improvements in viticultural efficiency, including better pest control—had once more become a significant problem during the 1950s. The question of whether it was not, rather, a problem of underconsumption came to the fore again. This no doubt helped motivate the government’s appointment of the Malan Commission of Inquiry into the General Distribution and Selling of Intoxicating Liquor. Its report led to legislation in 1962 that allowed for unrestricted sale of liquor to all races. The comprehensive Liquor Act of 1928, which governed the trade and industry, had confirmed the almost total prohibition of the supply of liquor to blacks (with severe limitation on sales to “coloreds” and “Asiatics,” while making provision for the application of the tot system in the Western Cape). As the commission noted, there had been illicit trade on a scale that “surpasses the wildest flights of imagination” (though wine would have played a comparatively minor role, except to the “coloreds” of the Western Cape).
The abandonment of an official racially based prohibition was motivated by both economic and political considerations. The government had many intimate links to the KWV and a close relationship with Cape wine farmers, whose capital was useful to the growth of Afrikaner nationalism, and it was keen to resolve the overproduction problems. Another factor was the usual state hunger to gain tax revenue. Moreover, the government was aware that resentment of prohibition and consequent police actions played their part in the anger increasingly being expressed by black people—as most dramatically in the demonstration that had led to the Sharpeville massacre (in which police killed sixty-nine demonstrators) and the defiant response in Langa in 1960. So consumption was allowed, but licensing sales outlets to blacks was quite another matter.
More significant in the KWV’s ostensible but paradoxical struggle against overproduction was legislation in 1957 empowering the KWV to set production limits for individual farms. The “quota system” essentially preserved the status quo—it made no distinction between high-quality wine production (where there was in fact generally a shortage and potential for growth) and bulk production, and it protected current growers. A crucial effect quotas had on the South African wine industry until their abandonment in 1992 was that they effectively vetoed the development of new wine regions where ambitious producers might seek to make high-quality wine. There were occasional amendments to the quota regulations, especially ones that allowed for expanded mass production in areas like the Northern Cape: total quota volume grew from 7.4 million hectoliters in 1957 to 12.5 million in 1990. The mass of legislation relating to the KWV was replaced and consolidated by Parliament in Act 47 of 1970, the “KWV Act.”
A highly publicized instance of the quota system’s thwarting winegrowing ambition was to lead to a limited but useful amendment in 1984. Tim Hamilton-Russell had started farming in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, planting the then southernmost, coolest vineyards in the Cape. But he had no quota for his important vineyards, and only by some strange and clearly problematical sleight of hand could he produce and sell wine at all—uncertified but increasingly recognized as fine. As Michael Fridjhon says (he tells the story in his Penguin