than ever before, but of greater significance for the finest wines is the international experience brought to bear on local traditions of what we can no longer call straightforward winemakers—they are winegrowers, or vignerons, in the European tradition, uniting the processes of growing grapes and vinifying them, always with the emphasis on the former. An analysis of the real elite of Cape wine producers would show that the majority of them demonstrate this continuity between cellar and vineyard, often with the same person responsible for managing both.
Chris Alheit is “dead certain that the golden age of Cape wine is ahead of us.” Thanks, he suggests, to the pioneering work of figures like Eben Sadie and viticulturist Rosa Kruger (the woman responsible for tirelessly seeking out and “rescuing” so many old vineyards), “the Cape has never been so loaded with promise.” Another of the younger generation of winemakers remarked to me recently: “We have prepared the soil of the future, and we have made the roadway to it. Now, just the same as with democracy in this country, we still have to move forward to get somewhere really good.”
2
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICAN WINE TO 1994
BIRTH AND MATURING OF THE INDUSTRY: 1652–1795
The origins of winegrowing in South Africa can be fixed with unusual accuracy. A crucial moment was recorded on 2 February 1659 in the logbook of Jan van Riebeeck, commander of the tiny settlement at the foot of Africa. It was nearly seven years since he and his expeditionary force of some ninety men had gone ashore at Table Bay, intent on establishing a revictualing station. The Cape of Good Hope had been known to Europeans since Bartholomew Diaz had rounded it in 1488, but circumstances in international trade suggested its usefulness to the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company).
“Today,” wrote van Riebeeck, “God be praised, wine was pressed for the first time from Cape grapes . . . mostly Muscadel and other white, round grapes, very fragrant and tasty. . . . These grapes, from three young vines planted two years ago, have yielded about 12 quarts of must, and we shall soon discover how it will be affected by maturing.” Wine production was probably not originally envisaged among the “needful refreshments” to be provided by the station, but van Riebeeck’s early enthusiasm about this potential addition to the company’s garden, in what is now the heart of Cape Town, made sense to the practical minds of the ruling Lords Seventeen in Amsterdam. Wine not only keeps better than water but could also help prevent scurvy among sailors making the long voyage between Europe and the company’s possessions in the East Indies. Moreover, if production could supply even just the needs of the European residents at the Cape, that would help reduce the “overwhelming expenditure” that the administrators back home were to continually abhor.
At any rate, van Riebeeck eventually got his grapes. The first rooted vines seem to have arrived rotten in 1654, but at least some of a subsequent shipment were successfully planted, and other cuttings followed. The commander also asked Amsterdam for winemaking equipment and information. Before leaving in 1662 he had learned not only something about winemaking but also some of the natural forces against which viticulturists must contend: in that year the crop was virtually destroyed by a plague of birds. Incidentally, it later became clear that one means the settlers used 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
