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 Book of South African Wine), the much-reported standoff “was beginning to embarrass the KWV—an organization which ordinarily seemed impervious to criticism and change. It is difficult to assert that your regulations are there in the interests of quality wine production, and then find yourself pilloried for failing to make provision for an innovator with vineyards in Hermanus.” The compromise was to amend the regulations to permit the sale and transfer of quota to another producer in the same or an adjacent region.
It’s worth taking a snapshot of the production situation around this pivotal period. There were some 300 million vines, at least half of them in the hot irrigated valleys of the Olifants, Orange, and Breede rivers. In 1979 the grape harvest was 6.22 million hectoliters, of which only 40 percent was used for wine, the rest going for juice or distillation. Of the natural wine, perhaps 10 percent could generously be called high-quality. In the vineyard, Chenin Blanc was still increasing its percentage share of plantings, and by 1979 had reached 29.3 percent (these percentages for grape plantings are adjusted from those published in contemporary KWV statistics, to exclude Sultana [Thompson seedless], not used for wine; this deduction has, sensibly, become standard practice in recent years for official statistics). Palomino followed (17.2 percent) but, like Cinsaut (now a mere 14.1 percent, having been overtaken by Chenin in 1968 at roughly 22 percent), it was on a downward path. Pinotage and Cabernet Sauvignon were the only two other red grapes in the top fifteen varieties, with both under 3 percent.
In fact, Cabernet, even at that miserable level, had greatly increased its plantings during the 1970s. The imminence of new legal controls restricting the use of variety names had trebled the price of the grape between 1970 and 1973 alone. Frans Malan of Simonsig, an early official “estate,” remarked at the time that it was now starting to be “a paying proposition” to grow more of the “‘noble varieties’ . . . it has never been so before.” It was a decade that saw, as the Hamilton-Russell story indicates, a definite rise in the quota of high ambition in Cape winemaking, and the emergence of some framework to shape it—as well as encouragement from developments in other parts of the New World. The famous tasting of American and French wines in Paris in 1976 fed the confidence and ambition of more than just Californian winemakers. It must be said, however, that there was more conservatism and complacency in the Cape than there was acquaintance with the wines or the winegrowing and winemaking practices of other countries, a situation that was not going to improve much until the 1990s. However, although the focus of the serious consumer was increasingly on the estate wines and their claims about provenance, the merchant houses too were supplying some remarkably good wines, notably in the leading brands of SFW. Some of the Nederburg wines of the 1970s were still drinking very well more than thirty years later, particularly the selections made for the annual auction that Nederburg inaugurated in 1975, which has taken place every year since then. The auction was in itself a boost for quality, although it no longer plays the vital role it once did in bringing fine wines to the attention of the wine lover.
The best of the merchants’ wines certainly should have been good: they were able to draw on grapes and wine from some of the finest vineyard sites in the country, even if these were hardly performing at the limits of their potential. In 1966 a book was published called Fairest Vineyards, by Kenneth Maxwell, claiming to be the first to give a virtually complete catalog of Cape wines. A large percentage were fortified but, looking at the list of table wines, it is clear that the majority of even these were the blends of the merchants: just a handful of names are of the estates that were
