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The history of the vine in South Africa can be traced to 1655, when Jan van Riebeeck of the Dutch East India Company founded Cape Town and established its first vineyard.
The first wines of the colony, derided by contemporaries for their “revolting sourness”, emerged four years later, to sustain sailors bound for the East Indies on the long ocean voyage. With the arrival of French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in their homeland, a new wealth of winemaking knowledge came to the Franschhoek Valley, and vineyards sprouted up in the 1680s and 1690s. However, Governor Simon van der Stel’s Constantia estate eclipsed the modest winemaking tradition of his predecessors, and the sweet Vin de Constance became the first New World wine to be coveted throughout the courts of Europe. Founded near Cape Town in 1685, Constantia—now a ward of the Coastal Region—was divided into two estates upon Stel’s death in 1712. In 1778, Groot Constantia, one of the original estates, was sold to Hendrik Cloete, who renovated the property and brought international acclaim to the wines. Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains (also known in South Africa as Muscat de Frontignan or Muscadel) and its red-berried variant provided the base for white and red versions of Vin de Constance, a dried grape wine sold in the early 1800s to a plethora of dignitaries, including King Louis Philippe (the last king of France) and the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte. Jane Austen and Charles Baudelaire penned prose and verse in praise of its charms. The wines flourished under British colonial rule, but the fortunes of Constantia—and of South African wines in general—sank in the latter half of the 19th century, as powdery mildew and phylloxera struck. Compounding the Cape wine industry