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 for winemakers. But suddenly the most urgent need was for a place to grow millions of vines of a very different kind from the ones that had made Constantia famous throughout the wine-drinking world; for in 1886 it was established that phylloxera had started its depredations in the Cape vineyards.
For long, the most significant disease in Cape vineyards was anthracnose, a fungal infection. Powdery mildew, Oidium tuckeri, was an import from northern America into Europe that did much damage there in the 1850s before sulfur was established as a satisfactory preventive treatment, but there seems to have been little alarm about it in the Cape, and when oidium started having noticeable effects in the greening vineyards of late 1859 it was not immediately identified. The disease spread fast, but once a local shortage of sulfur was resolved, the problem was eased, with only a few harvests significantly affected. Things would not be so easy with the next plague.
Also imported from North America into Europe, the small vineroot-feeding aphid relative now scientifically known as Daktulosphaira vitifoliae announced its effects there as early as 1863, and within three decades had started spreading a swath of destruction around the winegrowing world. Phylloxera vastatrix (the devastator) it was initially called, and many desperate treatments were tried as the vignerons of France watched their vineyards die—even after it had become increasingly clear that the only viable response was to grow the wine grapevine on rootstocks of American origin: evolution had ensured that these were immune.
There was some moderate watchfulness at the Cape at the time, but little real preparedness to deal with phylloxera by the time it became clear that the pest had already arrived. It was the French consul in Cape Town who—presumably having seen ravaged vines back home—in early 1886 alerted the authorities to signs of it in a vineyard in Mowbray, not far from the earliest Cape vineyards. It was revealed that the vineyard was indeed affected by phylloxera and, moreover, had been showing progressive deterioration for four years. The government immediately sent scientific inspectors to look at as many vineyards as possible. Through 1886 more farms were discovered to be affected, and then the pest reached the more outlying areas, until most were affected. Constantia was among the last, in 1898 (strangely, since it is within ten kilometers of Mowbray). The insect continued its remorseless progress despite government programs to combat the spread. Unlike in Australia, for example, the winged form of the pest appeared here, and there was no escape from its depredations. During the 1890s at least a quarter of the Cape’s vines were destroyed—while expensive chemical and other antidotes were also tried in vain. European experience showed that replanting on American rootstocks was vital and unavoidable; this proceeded, with a number of “American vine plantations” established through the wine lands to produce rootstocks, and research was undertaken to learn the best methods of grafting, as well as rootstock affinity.
Right through the 1890s there were insufficient supplies of rootstocks, however, and replanting was not as rapid as is sometimes supposed. Mr. C. Mayer, a German viticulturist at Groot Constantia, estimated in a 1900 “Retrospect on Phylloxera” that just fewer than two million grafted vines had been planted (out of a Cape total of more than 87 million), and “now at least one million grafted vines are being annually planted.” Many destroyed vineyards remained unreplaced, and there was, in fact, a useful turn toward the planting of fruit trees in areas where this was possible. The vineyards of Cape Town (other than those at Constantia), including the one where phylloxera had first been found, were swallowed by the encroaching suburbs; particularly during the early twentieth century, as many farmers as could do so turned to farming ostriches and alfalfa (lucerne) to feed them. Oudtshoorn in the Eastern Cape had five million vines in 1875; in 1909 it apparently produced no wine at all. Today virtually the whole of the Cape vineyard is planted on American rootstock; only the occasional vineyard in sandy soil successfully chances its luck.
Much hardship was caused to wine farmers by phylloxera, despite some governmental compensation. Altogether, in the decades following the near-total collapse of the export market and widespread damage to the vineyards, Cape viticulture was perhaps at its lowest
