THE KWV YEARS: SOUTH AFRICAN WINE TO 1994
For the greater part of the twentieth century the character and conditions of South African winemaking were shaped by the organization that came to be known simply as the KWV. Its origins were in a particularly severe episode of the Cape’s perennial overproduction that hit the wine industry in the early decades of the twentieth century. The initial aims of the organization were limited to resolving that problem, but its ambitions grew, and it was granted progressively more regulatory power by a succession of governments. Particularly close ties with the National Party and other forces of Afrikaner capital ensured that it was something more than influential in any legislation concerning the industry. This centralized power did have positive benefits for the industry (apart, that is, from guaranteeing an income for wine farmers), such as allowing a relatively smooth transition to an effective appellation and certification system. On the other hand, its strategies did much to discourage the making of fine wine, and left some crucial aspects of the industry very weak by the time its grip was fully relaxed in the 1990s, almost simultaneously with the collapse of the apartheid state.
Desperation, rather than visions of power, was behind the first steps toward producer unity in the early twentieth century. A few of the new cooperatives were surviving; others had collapsed. Joint action also came about at different times in protest against government increases in excise duties. In 1916, after representations on this issue failed to move the authorities, Charles Kohler, who had been for some years active in organizing wine farmers, presented plans for an industrywide cooperative that would control supply and thereby regulate the prices at which wine and brandy would be sold to wholesalers. A draft constitution was put forward, and a Viticultural Union held its first meeting in Paarl in December 1917; the following year it was floated as a company under the name the Koöperatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging van Zuid-Afrika Beperkt (Cooperative Winegrowers’ Association of South Africa Limited). The KWV, as it became universally known, was registered as a “mutual cooperative society” in 1923. Its aim was to “direct, control and regulate the sale and disposal by its members of their produce” in order to “secure or tend to secure for them a continuously adequate return for such produce.”
The overwhelming majority of wine farmers signed up—with just a few in Constantia and Stellenbosch opting out on the grounds that they had no trouble selling high-quality wine. Deals were made with “the trade”: the merchants would buy only from the KWV, which would not compete with them in the local market, but rather concentrate on exports. The prices paid to farmers rose significantly for a year or two, with the KWV at that stage converting the surplus into ethyl alcohol, but soon old patterns of overproduction were on the rise again. The system was not working well, but government intervention created a turning point for the KWV’s fortunes. Against the objections of the wholesalers, the Wine and Spirits Control Act of 1924 gave the KWV the power to fix annually the minimum price to be paid to farmers for distilling wine; for the time being, “good wine”—that is, wine not intended for distillation—was not included. This was just the first step in the arrogation to the KWV of great power.
At the same time, the KWV made plans to develop and improve the brandy industry by centering its distillation on the production of mature, pot-stilled brandy; it was, in fact, to become one of the world’s largest brandy producers. Quality of winemaking, too, began to improve. No doubt the support of the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of Stellenbosch (it was founded in 1917, though teaching in these subjects had been undertaken for nearly two decades already) was useful. The department’s first director was the eminent Dr. Abraham Izak Perold, who had already made a useful contribution to Cape viticulture by importing a number of new varieties and doing a good deal of viticultural research. That research was to lead to his publishing a Treatise on Viticulture (in Afrikaans in 1926 and in his own English translation a year later), as well as to the almost incidental creation of Pinotage, the most significant new variety produced in this country. Perold became the KWV’s chief research scientist in 1927. Among other activities he wrote numerous articles on improved winemaking techniques in the Wine and Spirits magazine founded for the benefit of wine farmers.
Perold was later joined at the KWV by another scientist, Charles Niehaus, who was responsible for establishing the local sherry industry, which was to be very important for some decades. The making of table wines also benefited, though at a very basic level: there is little indication that there was much to excite the serious wine lover in the 1920s 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
