drank this wine? Export possibilities remained limited, largely for reasons of poor quality—apart from the growing interest in Constantia. The company generally kept a monopoly on trade. At home it wanted wine for its hospital, slaves, local company officials, and use on company ships, as well as for the East Indies. Through the first half of the eighteenth century particularly, as both production and demand continually shifted—before settling into the dominant pattern of overproduction—the company sometimes tried to find external markets for wine; and sometimes it disallowed private sales to ships when its own needs met supply. In 1793 the company bought about 13 percent of the total production. The rest would have been sold on the local market, and to visiting ships when possible.
FROM 1795 TO 1910
In the internationally war- and revolution-ravaged decades around the close of the 1700s the little outpost of Europe at the foot of Africa changed hands three times, with great implications for it—and its wine industry. As the vines were coming into leaf in 1795, Dutch East India Company rule was ended by the first British occupation. This was maintained until 1803, but the subsequent period of Netherlandish rule lasted only until the British occupation of 1806, which led to the cession of the Cape Colony to Britain in 1814.
War, and specifically the change of regime, was good for the wine trade here: commercial and naval shipping traffic and the British garrison presence prompted a substantial increase in plantings and production. The population also exploded about this time. The Khoisan were not counted, but the number of Europeans rose from 7,736 in 1770 to more than 20,000 by the end of the century and more than double that by 1820; the slave population rose from 8,200 to nearly 32,000 in that total period. That figure inevitably includes a lot of wine drinkers, even apart from the Khoisan (laborers and slaves were given rations of wine, largely as part of a system of social control, in a precursor to the notorious tot system).
Just under ten million vines were recorded for 1795, and the number more than doubled over the next decade, particularly in the Stellenbosch and Paarl-Drakenstein areas. Many of the grander rural examples of Cape Dutch architecture—those lovely whitewashed and elaborately gabled buildings—date from this time of prosperity for the larger and more successful farmers.
The economic health of Britain’s new colony as a whole was not robust, however. The colonial masters sought a viable export commodity in order to generate local revenue and address the chronic trade deficit. They decided to foster the Cape wine industry even though there was already awareness of problems of quality: apart from what they tasted themselves, they knew that other export markets had been lost when Cape wines had been rejected. In 1813 duties payable on Cape wines imported into Britain were substantially reduced, as Governor Cradock was to announce “with the most lively satisfaction.” A short-lived golden age for Cape exporters had begun. It ended in 1825 when the preferential tariffs were reduced—Cape wine was still to be charged lower duties than most others, but the major incentive was gone, particularly when transport costs and the quality problem were taken into account.
By 1825 there were more than 31 million vines planted, a threefold increase from 1795—most of them Greengrape (Sémillon, that is), for reasons discussed in chapter 3. Wine production varied remarkably from year to year, but generally rose steadily over the period: in the five years 1821–1825 it averaged just under 17,000 leaguers. Production of infamously bad Cape brandy was fairly static at little more than 1,000 leaguers. The expanding home market remained hugely important, though exports increased. In 1813, just 200 leaguers of Cape wine went to dubiously delight palates in the new mother country, less than a tenth of that year’s exports. This figure rose dramatically: the average export of ordinary wine to Britain for the period 1821–1825 was 5,416 leaguers, approximately three-quarters of all exports. Total wine exports in these five 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
