Читать книгу Wines of the New South Africa - Tim James - Страница 12

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 recent historian Eric Bolsmann notes drily, despite many romantic claims and assumptions about their role in the development of a winemaking culture, “details of their specific contributions are conspicuously lacking.”

While keeping in mind that the objective for the settlement at the Cape was not to build a major wine industry, the governor took account of the growing significance of wine to the little society and its economy. He encouraged the use of new varieties, and perhaps introduced the Pontac and Muscat de Frontignan that were going to be important in his personal adventure in wine; he imposed some controls over sales (again, the company’s interests, needs, and revenues were paramount); and he attempted to improve quality. He had long found local wine to be “exceptionally harsh,” and was aware that slovenly and ignorant practices in vineyard and cellar were to blame. He tried to do something about the problem of lack of ripeness at harvest; a committee was established to visit wineries and ascertain that the grapes were adequately ripe before they were pressed.

Early exports had already foundered because of poor quality. The first tiny export seems to have been to Batavia in 1679, and some samples also braved the journey back to Amsterdam, where the Lords Seventeen found it “not bad,” but expensive in comparison with Canary and Spanish wine. But there were complaints from Holland and Batavia, and in 1688 the Cape was told firmly not to send any more. If exports were not going to supply the company with income, however, sales at home were starting to do so, through licenses, taxes, and excise duties. English buccaneer and author William Dampier was pleased to find in the 1690s, “The country is of late so well stocked with Vineyards that they make abundance of Wine of which they have enough and to spare, and do sell great quantities to Ships that touch here.” The no doubt more respectable Reverend J. Ovington noted in 1696 that an “exorbitant Fine upon the Tavern and Tipling Houses makes them exact extravagant Rates from the Guests that drink the Liquor.”

Van der Stel’s most significant contribution to winegrowing was the tradition of excellence he established at the large estate he was granted, called Constantia. Even today the past of Constantia is important to the present, something that the industry as a whole can invoke with pride—and relief, for without Constantia, the older history of South African wine would be a much more depressing story. The land there was transformed into a flourishing farm through its owner’s “salutary zeal” and, one must presume, even more so through the zeal of his many slaves; farm buildings, slave quarters, and a house were built; the vineyard was larger and more carefully planted and tended than any other in the Cape at the time. By 1700, the year after he retired to live at Constantia, further additions and grants had given him a virtual empire in the Cape Peninsula, where he farmed wheat and cattle on a large scale, as well as vines. The “Governor’s wine,” made in the sweet, liquorous style then most in demand, soon established a reputation for excellence in the Cape and even beyond, first in Batavia (where it was found that “the wine from Constantia is of a much higher quality than any sent out so far”) and Holland, and then farther afield. Numerous accounts survive of more or less distinguished visitors to the Cape, who frequently called in at the principal estates. French traveler François Valentijn visited first in 1705, and gave “principal praise and honour” to van der Stel and his son (at Vergelegen) “since, although before their times there were already vines here, and wine had already been pressed, it is certain that the old Heer van der Stel brought to his outstanding country estate many sorts of vine stocks from Germany and elsewhere, previously unknown here; also that until now there is no wine to be compared to the red Constantia wine.”

This is perhaps the place to note that in fact, up through the nineteenth century, it is impossible to be sure what varieties were grown. Bewildering numbers of names are mentioned by travelers—mostly carrying little conviction to modern readers, on account of some strange names and stranger associations (Pontac as “the great grape of Côte-Rôtie,” for example), and there is little more than frustration to be had from learning that Vergelegen at the end of the seventeenth century had “Russelaar, Pottebakker, and a Persian long white variety, as well as varieties from Avignon, Champagne and Burgundy.” We can be sure, however, in that the first century of Cape viticulture, more or less important contributions were made by Greengrape (Sémillon), White French (Palomino), Steen (Chenin Blanc), a few Muscats, and Pontac (a grape of the teinturier type). In fact it does seem that white grapes have dominated the Cape vineyard, with little real competition until the twentieth century brought demand for more red wines on the local market.

Simon van der Stel died in 1712. The outlying properties reverted to the Dutch East India Company, and Constantia itself was divided into three portions and auctioned off. The tradition of Constantia wine was continued and developed particularly on the portions known as Groot Constantia (“large Constantia,” the home farm, with the estate buildings) and Klein Constantia (“little Constantia”—but not the same as the present estate of that name). It was Johannes Colijn, into whose hands Klein Constantia soon passed, who established the large export market for Constantia, to such an extent that in the 1730s demand had outstripped supply. Fortunately, Groot Constantia, after a period in which its potential had been somewhat neglected, acquired a new owner, and a long and profitable partnership arrangement between the two properties was initiated. It continued through some ownership changes—during which it seems the quality of the wine fell off somewhat—until Hendrik Cloete acquired Groot Constantia in 1776 and inaugurated a renewed and perhaps heightened period of excellence in the wine of Constantia, soon coinciding with the new marketing possibilities that were to emerge with the passing of the Cape into British control.

Simon van der Stel had been succeeded as governor in 1699 by his eldest son, Willem Adriaan, who confused more culpably than his father the distinction between serving his private interests and performing his duties. In the history of South African wine he is remembered now as the founder of another great estate, Vergelegen, acquired almost as soon as he took office. As Louis Leipoldt, in his 300 Years of Cape Wine, notes, “no expense, either on his or the Company’s part, was spared to make it a most imposing undertaking.” As well as establishing fruit orchards and cattle and sheep stations, and having a mansion built that reportedly required the services of very many of the company’s slaves in its construction, he also planted substantial vineyards. Despite this, there is no account of the wines being comparable to Constantia’s. There was, in fact, little time for the vines and wines to reach their potential. An arrogant—not to say illegal, torturous, and brutal—confrontation with some of the wealthier burghers, who objected to Willem Adriaan’s attempts to monopolize for his own profit various parts of trade including the export of wine, led to his downfall. In 1707 he was exiled, and soon thereafter the splendid estate was broken up.

Meanwhile, the colony expanded ever-farther outward from Cape Town, as farmers sought new grazing lands not exhausted by their cattle and new sources of cheap meat once they had shot the wild animals with which the plains had teemed on their arrival. The settlement was growing—largely through natural increase, as the company thought that economic circumstances precluded absorbing more white immigrants as some had proposed (the alternative, considering labor needs, was to bring in more slaves, which is what was done). But expansion in the eighteenth century had little effect on wine production: wine lands that would become economically viable once roads and railways were built were still impossible to develop. The only way a farmer could take his barrels of wine to sell in Cape Town was expensively and laboriously by ox-drawn wagon, which meant that wine was produced only within a few days’ journey of the market. Transportation even for those farmers was a problem; a new hard road across the sandy Cape Flats reached Klapmuts near Paarl only around the middle of the nineteenth century, when it almost halved the transport costs of farmers in that region.

In 1752 a Swedish traveler, Anders Sparrman, noted that after leaving the areas of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein the only vineyard he found was one for domestic use at Swellendam. In those two areas and in the peninsula, however, production and planting grew steadily during the eighteenth century. It much more than doubled between 1700 and 1750, by which date nearly four million vines were producing about 3,000 leaguers of wine. By 1794 these figures had increased by about 150 percent; Drakenstein (the larger Paarl area today) was responsible for more than half of production, followed by Stellenbosch; the “Cape” contributed less than a tenth.

Who bought and 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 was a sudden sharp increase in exports to Britain in the late 1850s because of oidium-decimated European crops, but that was a temporary respite, and matters became worse still after 1861, when a British trade treaty with France reduced duties on that country’s wines. All supplier countries to Britain were now to be treated equally, with duties being differentiated only on grounds of alcoholic strength—a further blow to the Cape, whose wines were routinely heavily fortified to help them withstand the rigors of the sea voyage to Europe. In 1862, Cape wine exports to Britain were down to 356 leaguers, less than they had been in 1814.

Britain, in the years of preferential tariffs, was taking some three-quarters of the Cape’s wine exports. The absolute total exports sometimes varied as wildly from year to year as did total production. For example, in 1816 total wine production (excluding brandy) was 15,398 leaguers (50 percent more than in the following vintage); total exports were 3,647 leaguers (of which 70 percent went to Britain). In 1823 production was 21,147 leaguers (5,000 more than in the previous year) and exports 7,013 (not much different from the previous year). In the years when exports to Britain were falling, there were renewed attempts to strengthen other markets—including the United States, which was a moderately successful outlet for a time, with an average of 23 leaguers going there annually in the 1835–1854 period. The basic problem, apart from import duty anomalies, seems to have been, as so often, that Cape wine could not compete on a quality level with suppliers from Europe. But in the nineteenth century, Cape wine was exported to a remarkable number of countries (if not consistently), from Jamaica to Australia, and from India to Sweden.

Despite undoubted hardships for many wine farmers, the wine industry somehow more than survived the problems occasioned by falling exports. In 1865 the number of vines was over 55 million (there were 31 million in 1825), and production rose significantly, at least helped by a burgeoning population. An increasing proportion of the surplus was diverted to brandy over the following century. Cape brandy had been, according to an anonymous writer in 1820, “one of the worst and most pernicious spirits ever produced.” Now there were concerted attempts to encourage an improvement, both to make it more widely salable and to make it acceptable for fortifying wine: most dealers with any ambitions for quality used imported French brandy for that purpose. Quantities as well as quality rose: in the twenty-five years before 1860 production nearly quadrupled, to about 4,000 leaguers.

There was less improvement with wine. Authorities and commentators continued to blame and lament the quality of Cape wine (Constantia always excluded) and insist on the desirability of raising standards—an “imperious necessity” Governor Bourke called it. In fact, reading many of the contemporary accounts, one wonders how the stuff ever got sold at all, let alone drunk. In 1824, at the height of exports to England, a Cape newspaper noted, “With regard to Cape Madeira, and the Wines in General of this Colony, it is a fact which is acknowledged by everybody, that nothing is so bad in England as the Wines of the Cape.” Descriptions abound of “miserable trash” that is “villainous,” “execrable,” “filthy,” and so on—with, as well as “an undisguised taste of brandy,” a frequently observed “earthy taste.” Too often and too easily Cape wine “turned sour” in transit and arrived at its export destination undrinkable. A frequently occurring complaint was that Cape wine was sold too young: it would appear that it required at least a year’s maturation, preferably more, before it was palatable.

What were the types of wines being made in the Cape in the first half of the nineteenth century, and why hadn’t quality been improved? Mention has been made of the near monopoly of the vineyards by Greengrape, later identified as Sémillon. As to types of wine, it is impossible to penetrate behind most of the various names and usefully ponder how Cape Malaga, Vintint, Moselle, Hock, and Vin de Graves were discriminated, and how they differed from Cape Madeira. It would seem that a turn from sweet wines at the beginning of the century (Cape Madeira, Steen, and Hanepoot seem to have been sweet) to predominantly dry wines by the middle of the century is ascribable to British taste. Virtually all these wines (though probably not usually Constantia) were to some degree fortified.

Blame for their poor quality was, unsurprisingly, disputed. A few perceptive observers noted viticultural problems, while “slovenly” winemaking was frequently cited; many noticed wine farmers picking unripe grapes and including leaves, earth, and rotten grapes, allowing the wine to ferment at too high a temperature, the misuse of sulfur, dirty casks (there seems to have often been a severe shortage of suitable containers, many of which might have been used for highly unsuitable contents in their journey to the colony)—and, above all, a general dirtiness. But if the wine farmers were negligent, and frequently excoriated by the Cape Town dealers who took in most of the colony’s wine production, many implicated the dealers, too. One commentator spoke of them as treating the wines they purchased from farmers “as raw materials, to be altered and fashioned according to their own taste and judgement. An injudicious tampering with it has deteriorated instead of improving the commodity.” Furthermore, it was rather convincingly suggested, “the wine boers were encouraged to make the greatest possible quantity of wine, with entire disregard for its quality.” Dealers in England did not go unblamed either, as many travelers noted that Cape wine tasted better in its land of origin, and ascribed this to “altering and fashioning” in London more than to the sea voyage between the two places.

Generally, however, it was clear that the primary need was to improve winemaking techniques. Many attempts were made by government as well as private individuals and bodies to improve matters. Farmers were offered information through newspaper articles, pamphlets, and handbooks about the best viticultural and winemaking methods; Governor Cradock promised “premiums and rewards . . . for the production of the best Wines,” and established an office of Wine Taster intended to control the quality of wine bound for export. Regulations attempted to ensure that wines were sufficiently aged, and suchlike. A Cape Wine Trade Committee representing growers, manufacturers, and merchants was established in 1826 in the wake of the export market’s collapse. Unfortunately, because of the structural impediments for most farmers of a lack of capital and a lack of price incentive, all these attempts proved futile. Most Cape wine—and even more, Cape brandy—remained “damnable poor stuff.”

Accounts of winemaking at the Cape right up to the end of the nineteenth century seem to indicate a fairly standard approach—probably the most significant difference would be the state of the grapes when picked, the cleanliness of the cellar, and the state of the casks used for fermenting and maturing the wine. Otto Mentzel, a German resident in the Cape in the 1830s, describes the standard means of pressing: “A ‘balie’ or barrel, (usually a leaguer cask cut in two) which is pierced at the bottom and along the sides with many holes made with an half-inch drill, stands on a trestle in a second larger barrel, without holes except for a bunghole, through which the must that is trodden out, passes into a pail or barrel placed beneath it. A slave stands in the perforated barrel, holds onto a short piece of rope stretched above him, and treads the grapes with which it is filled with bare feet.” Carl Thunberg, traveling in the Cape in the 1770s, also observed this basic process, adding, “the must that runs out is put into large high vessels to ferment.” Then “the trodden grapes, before they are farther pressed, are put, stalks and all, upon a coarse strainer (or the bottom of a bed) made of rattans, on which they rub the fruit with their hands, till the husks go through it, the stalks in the meantime remaining behind, which are now separated and thrown away, as they are supposed to make the wine austere and bitter. The husks are then put into the fermenting-vessel, which the next morning is in full fermentation.”

Rather more horrified, Baron Carl von Babo, the government viticulturist toward the end of the nineteenth century and a passionate advocate of improved winemaking methods, spoke in a government report of “a number of half-naked coloured men” trampling the grapes with feet carrying “acetous germs” from the wine-splashed floor, not to mention dirt and sweat: “Although this does not perceptibly increase the quantity,” Babo noted, “it certainly imparts a most objectionable bouquet to the wine.” He added, “Juice, husks and stalks are thrown together into the fermenting tubs, and the astringent harsh tannin is thus extracted.”

Making the best red wine, Mentzel suggested, requires removing the stems before the grapes are crushed, after which “they are left in this state in a vessel for 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 ebb yet—though things were to get worse as the century turned and brought imperialist war in South Africa, followed by depression. Looking at contemporary accounts of wine-lands problems, the wonder is that the industry survived. Not only that: bizarrely, production increased during the difficult years. In 1860, when one would have thought that wine farmers would have already turned to something else if they could, or at least have ceased planting, there were 55 million vines planted; in 1875 there were nearly 70 million. The league table for that year shows Paarl ahead as usual with some 21 million vines, followed by Stellenbosch with 16 million. Then come some areas that had not featured before in this story, and had become viable through improved communications within the colony, particularly the railway lines—and it is presumably these new plantings by hopeful pioneers that account for the overall increase: Oudtshoorn, Robertson, and Worcester each had more than 5 million vines; the Cape, Malmesbury (Swartland), Tulbagh, and Riversdale about half of that number.

Although reliable statistics from this time are hard to come by, a government report notes that in 1882–1883 wine production was nearly 40,000 leaguers, up from 25,000 in 1860. Brandy production had proportionately grown even more, to more than 11,000 leaguers, reflecting the one pale gleam on the winemakers’ horizon: the possibility of exports to the hard men and no doubt equally hard women in Kimberley, where the diamond rush had begun in 1866. In 1888, about 4,905 leaguers of spirits were sent to Kimberley, something like half of the total production. From the late 1880s the goldfields of the Transvaal also offered the prospect of some profit to those toiling in the vineyards of the Western Cape. Dr. Hahn, in a report of 1882, was emphatic that, taking into account local costs and quality and the price of wine in Europe, “the idea of exporting Cape wine to Europe at present must be altogether abandoned”; the diamond fields, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State were much more likely prospects, with drinkers perhaps rather less discriminating than those in England—or indeed, than the English in the Cape Colony, where much more wine was imported than exported at the time and certainly not enough of the local product was drunk to please the farmers and merchants.

Less than ever was there doubt in the minds of the authorities (and of drinkers!) that the quality of Cape wine was also very low. In 1887 yet another report to a concerned Parliament stressed, “The production of wine is still increasing but . . . there is no demand for the increased production. The price for wine has therefore gone down considerably, especially of the inferior kinds, of which some are almost unsalable, as they are unfit even for making spirits.” In 1885, after Baron Carl von Babo was appointed as government viticulturist, his first report, which included scathing views of winemaking techniques, recommended the founding of the model farm and viticultural school at Groot Constantia.

In fact, the viticultural school there never seems to have amounted to much, in the face of the pressing need for the farm to produce wine in commercial quantities to satisfy the Treasury as well as enough American rootstocks to satisfy phylloxera-ridden farmers. This is a great pity, as there were signs that a deal of good might have been achieved. Viticulturally, for example, apart from planting with better varieties, there were useful trials of different trellising and vine-spacing practices, and successful experimental treatments for pests like the snoutbeetle (a pernicious weevil). In the cellar, among other investigations, inoculated yeasts were tried and observed. And the benefits of the “attemporator” or “cooling worm”—basically a coil of pipe carrying cool water through the fermenting must—did in fact reach far beyond Constantia. But a later viticultural expert, Raymond Dubois, pointed out the inadequacies of even Groot Constantia as a model. Australia, he said, has “better buildings, more advanced and fitted with modern machinery and time and labour-saving implements,” while “there is not one cellar in the whole of the Colony fit to guarantee good wine.” Unfortunately, his 1905 report indicates little continued progress in experimental work or establishing a teaching institution. The straitened financial state of the colony, suffering a severe depression after the wars between Britain and the Boer republics, was blamed.

So severe was the effect of the “prevailing depression” on the wine industry that various commissions were appointed to look into the condition of the wine districts. A 1905 inquiry “established beyond a doubt that the Wine and Brandy Industry is at present in an alarming state of depression.” A lengthier 1909 commission report gives a useful overview of the state of the industry. The great majority of wine farms were mortgaged, the commission noted, and in most areas land values were greatly depreciated. No longer was there a labor shortage. The commission remarked that “the wages paid have decreased considerably, and . . . the condition of the labouring classes generally is a deplorable one . . . ; the grower has been forced to confine himself only to the most necessary of work on his farm.” It quotes a farmer in Paarl saying, “It used to be very difficult for us to get coloured labor, but now if you hold up your finger you can get hundreds.”

But production was, as ever, excessive. The average harvest in 1907 and 1908 yielded nearly 45,000 leaguers. The 1909 harvest was apparently a very poor one, however—“a decided blessing in disguise, seeing that, as far as can be ascertained, considerable stocks of wine and spirits of the previous vintage were still on the hands of merchants, farmers and certain of the Wineries at the commencement of this year.” In fact, there is some evidence that the area of the colony’s vineyard had decreased. The commission noted that census returns for 1904 had given the total area under vines as 16,610 morgen (a morgen being about 0.85 hectare), while for 1909 it appeared to be 10,120 morgen. This major decline doubtless reflects the depredations of the assiduous phylloxera: in 1904 there were some 19.25 million grafted vines and still 58.5 million ungrafted ones—presumably many of the latter had succumbed by 1909 and not been replaced.

But more than the total production, perhaps, it is interesting to note the proportions of the different varieties given for 1909. Greengrape was still by far the largest contributor to the total, but down from its near-monopoly to 40 percent. Steen (Chenin Blanc), White French (Palomino), and Red Muscadel (Muscat) were high on the list, but Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc now featured (Syrah was not listed, but was planted at Groot Constantia in the 1890s). More significant was the rise of Cinsaut (called Hermitage). It appears to have been brought into the country about 1880 and in 1909 was third only after the two popular white grapes. The commission in fact specifically connected Hermitage to a factor it identified as contributing to excess wine production, the racial prohibition that had grown up in southern Africa: “Before the imposition of restrictions on the sale of liquor to Natives in the Transvaal, a large demand existed among the Natives on the mines in that country for Hermitage, sweetened and slightly fortified”—thus accounting for the growth in those plantings. The commission noted that in the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, “the sale or supply of liquor to any coloured person is prohibited”; an essentially similar situation prevailed in Natal, and “in most districts of the Cape Colony itself restrictions prevail against the sale of wine and spirits to the aboriginal native.” These were all British colonies, and it hardly needs pointing out, of course, that racism did not leap forth new from the head of the National Party when it came to power in 1948 and formalized apartheid.

One response to the severe crisis was producer cooperation. The 1905 government inquiry had recommended the establishment of cooperative wineries to enable more effective use of machinery and lower costs, as well as to realize the benefits of collective marketing. With substantial government financial support, nine cooperatives were established, the Drostdy in Tulbagh being the first in 1906. Four of them, however, were not to survive long in the continuing conditions of slump and overproduction. But a man called Charles Kohler was already starting to work on his conviction that only a centralized, unifying body could resolve the crisis. The organization that was born from the crisis and Kohler’s work was to change fundamentally the course of Cape wine production. “South African wine production” we should call it now, in light of the political uniting of the two defeated boer republics (Transvaal and Free State) with the two British colonies (Cape and Natal) as the Union of South Africa in 1910. That unity was to also affect the wine industry, which was henceforth, after its earlier central importance in the Cape’s economy, to be just one struggling agricultural sector among others in the eyes of a national government—all needing, at this period, to capitalize in order to survive.

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 6 to 19; by 1950 there were 30, by 1955 there were 46. The introduction of expensive 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 to become much better known in the next decade: Delheim, Muratie, Twee Jonge Gezellen, Schoongezicht, Rustenberg . . . and precious few others. Ten years later, another book was produced: Estate Wines of South Africa, by Graham Knox. It profiled forty estates that were producing their own wine, and an “Estate Wine Record” at the end listed a few hundred such wines.

The “estate” was a concept legislated by Parliament as part of the Wine of Origin (WO) Scheme, which came into being in 1973 (see chapter 4). The aims of the scheme were twofold: it provided an appellation system to assist with continued exports to a Britain now joining the European Economic Community, and responded to the demands of the small producers. In 1971 the Cape Estate Wine Producers’ Association started meeting with the governmental committee of inquiry into the production and marketing of estate wines, feeding into the process that resulted in the first version of the WO scheme. Controls over claims as to origin, variety, and vintage were to play an important part in the marketing and growth of the independent producers during the 1970s and beyond. They gave registered estates, defined then as the smallest units of the scheme, an enormous cachet—and also lent that cachet to other independent producers even if they did not meet all the requirements of estates or wish to register as such. It became established that, as Knox noted in his book, “not all Estate wine is fine wine, nor is it all necessarily superior to the produce of the wine merchants’ cellars, but the best wines of the country are grown and made on the Estate principle.” Meanwhile, of course, most of the farms now selling wines under their own labels continued to supply grapes or wine to the merchants.

Undoubtedly, much needed to be done if the Cape was to start producing more than a few isolated examples of fine wine, and if the number of smaller producers making serious, terroir-driven wines in their own cellars was to increase. What cellar expertise there was derived more from experience in Germany than in France—which might well have proved useful in making white wine, but was less evidently so for the reds. And as for the vineyards, amid all the Chenin Blanc (a fine grape but treated as a workhorse) and Cinsaut, there was a paucity of varieties internationally recognized as premium. A factor that was to play a role in improving the quality of both viticultural and winemaking practice from the 1970s onward was the extensive research undertaken at the Enological and Viticultural Research Institute. Generally known simply as Nietvoorbij, which was the name of the experimental farm just outside Stellenbosch where it was based, the institute was inaugurated in 1969.

The bureaucrats responsible for controlling new plant material and seeing to the quarantining of imports were less helpful in overcoming the desperate shortage of high-quality planting material. It could take a great many years to get a new clone or variety into the ground. The spectacular result of the steps taken by many of the Cape’s leading producers to import material illegally was a public scandal, and the Klopper Commission of Inquiry of 1986 found evidence that “the illegal importation of vine propagating material had started as long ago as the beginning of 1973 and had continued intermittently into the eighties,” with at least some knowledge of it on the part of the authorities. The focus of the inquiry was Chardonnay—or rather Auxerrois, as it was revealed that, ironically, this second-rate variety was what had mistakenly been imported and propagated on many of the Cape’s best-known properties—but other varieties were also illegally imported. Also imported, it seems, were some of the diseases that quarantining is precisely designed to guard against.

Among the most important figures accused by the Klopper inquiry were Peter Finlayson, the first winemaker at Hamilton Russell, and Danie de Wet, a great innovator at De Wetshof in Robertson and later a pillar of the Cape wine industry establishment. Another was a man who deserves credit for his role in modernizing the Cape vineyard and perhaps even more for his influence on local winemaking. This was Julius Laszlo, who arrived from Romania in 1974, armed with a doctorate in soil microbiology from Moscow. After periods at Nietvoorbij and Boschendal he took charge of technical development at the Bergkelder (meaning “mountain cellar”), part of the large Distillers Corporation. This was not only responsible for a number of increasingly ambitious ranges, but had entered into partnership with a number of leading wine estates (including Meerlust, Alto, and La Motte). The deal involved not just the crucial marketing of wines but also access to some of the best expertise available, as well as maturation (and bottling) in excellent conditions. Laszlo was innovative in, for example, his insistence on cellar hygiene, but is best remembered for introducing new small oak barrels as an important resource for makers of serious red wines.

The situation with regard to such wines was remarkably different at the end of the 1970s from what it had been ten years before. It was a time of innovation and experimentation on the estates even more than in the more ambitious, and better equipped, divisions of the wholesalers, where Julius Laszlo and Günter Brözel were revolutionizing production. The Cape Independent Winemakers Guild was founded in 1983 “to contribute to the advancement of the quality of Cape wines by mutually developing the knowledge, capabilities and horizons of the members.” It was instigated by Billy Hofmeyr, a lover of Bordeaux, who was in the process of abandoning his career as a quantity surveyor in favor of developing his recently acquired small Paarl farm, Welgemeend. It was Hofmeyr who brought out, in 1979, not only the Cape’s first Bordeaux-style blend, but also its first blend of Pinotage with other varieties in the attempt to make a local interpretation of a classic southern Rhône wine. The Bordeaux blend was to be taken up enthusiastically through the 1980s, but the forerunner of the “Cape blend” was not to be much copied until the 1990s. (The guild was to drop “Independent” from its name and, particularly through its annual auction, arguably put greater stress on marketing its members’ wines than on advancing winemaking skills.)

In many ways, the 1980s can be seen as a period of consolidation of the 1970s innovations, as well as preparation of the conditions that helped make possible the massive breakthrough of the 1990s, when political liberation at home opened the wine industry to the world. At this stage, of course, the situation in terms of exports was getting worse for the producers. The informal sanctions that had begun as early as 1963 took on greater, formal force starting in 1985: exports—apart from shady dealings with Eastern Europe—fell between 1964 and 1989 by about two-thirds. Other changes were more positive for the industry. The WO system continued to elaborate itself in terms of both appellations and controls. The limited market in quotas mentioned above did allow a small amount of innovation from the likes of Hamilton Russell, though independent producers of high-quality wines continued to be severely hampered by the quota system. The number of small producers was nonetheless growing, and the manufacturing wholesalers’ share of the market was falling. KWV power had severely limited the number of wholesalers from the early years, and complicated restructuring deals in the 1970s had resulted in the amalgamation of the two overwhelmingly largest of them, Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery and Distillers/Oude Meester, into one monopolistic entity, Cape Wine and Distillers. But this marriage was annulled in 1988—in the name of the free market, although the same shareholders retained control of both SFW and Distillers. The only competing companies of note were Gilbey (part-owned by those same shareholders), and Union Wines and Douglas Green (which soon united as Douglas Green Bellingham).

The small local market (in the absence of an international one) for better-quality Cape wine was growing and becoming more exigeant. The indispensable guide to South African wine inaugurated by John and Erica Platter in 1980 rapidly became an annual one. The tenth anniversary edition of the Platter Guide briefly looked back at a decade that had seen the number of wines it described rise from 1,250 to about 4,000, and noted:

Progress and proliferation, yes, both dramatic and erratic. Our first edition recorded one Cape chardonnay. There are now 40. And who would have guessed then that chenin blanc . . . would be overshadowed so rapidly and emphatically, as a dry white wine, by sauvignon blanc, which accounted for four labels then and 121 now. Only one methode champenoise sparkling wine featured in the first edition; there are now 17. The classic (Bordeaux) claret blend, a commonplace today . . . had yet to make its appearance, and amongst its first successful producers was an estate which hadn’t bottled a single vintage by 1980. Nor, for that matter, had some of our finest quality cellars in other categories—pinot noir, chardonnay, etc.

Nonetheless, the fundamental situation of the vineyards was changing only slowly beneath this important development. By 1990, Chenin’s domination had grown, and it now constituted more than 35 percent of hectarage, while white grapes in general accounted for more than 85 percent of the total. Chardonnay was up from virtually nothing to nearly 1.7 percent, and Cabernet had crept up a little over the decade, to 4.2 percent; Syrah remained below 1 percent. In the early 1990s the surplus pool going to KWV for distillation and fruit juice could still take up 45 percent of the vintage. Another ten years on, and all these statistics were to be dramatically different.

The end of the white minority regime in 1994 allowed for the remarkable changes in the South African wine industry that followed. In the shadow of this structural change came others: the collapse of the KWV quota system in 1992 and of the minimum price in 1994 were notable moments in the gradual dissipation of its once massive control and restrictive powers of regulation; in 1997 the organization was converted into a company. Although the KWV lives on as a large producer—memorably described by critic Michael Fridjhon as now just one hustler among the rest—the KWV era, with its positive and all its negative aspects, was ended.