South African wine: Constantia, isolation and reconstruction

Wine was first made at the Cape in 1659, and by the eighteenth century Constantia — a sweet wine from the slopes below Table Mountain — was among the most sought-after wines in Europe, appearing in Jane Austen and Dickens and shipped to European courts.

That trade collapsed in the nineteenth century under the combined weight of powdery mildew, phylloxera and the loss of preferential access to the British market.

From 1918 the KWV, a producers’ cooperative granted statutory powers, controlled prices, quotas and minimum prices for most of the century. It stabilised farmer incomes and comprehensively discouraged quality and experimentation, and much of the vineyard was planted to distilling varieties.

The industry’s history is inseparable from that of forced and coerced labour. Wine at the Cape was built on slavery until abolition in 1834, and the dop system — paying farm workers partly in wine — persisted into the late twentieth century and left a documented legacy of alcohol harm in farming communities. It was outlawed, and its consequences have not disappeared.

International isolation under apartheid-era sanctions cut the industry off from export markets and from technical exchange until the 1990s.

Since 1994 the industry has rebuilt rapidly: deregulation, replanting to quality varieties, a distinctive Chenin Blanc and Cape Bordeaux-blend identity, and the establishment of ethical-trade certification schemes. Land ownership and labour conditions remain contested.