In Afrikaans there’s a saying: “Die een se dood is die ander se brood” and, literally translated, it means that the death of one man becomes the bread of the other. The European wars affected winemaking in France and thanks to that, the Cape wine farmers found that the demand for their wine grew considerably.  Even the English were drinking wine in the late eighteenth century (they drank anything until that time and the Elizabethans, especially, consumed copious amounts of raw ale and sack, not to mention beer and gin).

Granted, tea was beginning to prove a strong competitor to wine but sufficient numbers of Brits were very partial to a spot of sweet wine, port or sherry. The preference for beverages other than wine was not because they didn’t know about wine, it’s just that (like the Dutch) they couldn’t really make it even though they certainly knew how to distribute it!  (Chaucer’s father was a wine merchant back in the Middle Ages). And so the Cape wine farmers became rich, built huge houses and spent the money they made from selling wine happily … until disaster struck in the form of an altered duty structure. In 1861 the Palmerston Government of Britain entered into a treaty of commerce with France that reduced the existing import duties on wine from France to a mere three shillings a gallon and in 1862 it was reduced even more to one shilling a gallon! These changes hit the Cape wine farmers right on the nose. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone, typically hadn’t bothered to consult with the Cape farmers to see how it would affect them and many of them were forced to sell up and go. But as we all know, the universe has a way of settling matters – especially those that are morally wrong and this time was no exception. It was not too long after that, that the dreaded Phylloxera vastatrix struck. This black flu of

vines decimated the winelands of Europe with France losing 75% of her vineyards. The solution would be found in America whence the little aphid came as it lived quite happily in naturally parastitic relationships with about 60 species of locally found wild grape-vines. At first the South Africans merely watched the  European disaster from a distance and took the advice of an Austrian viticulturalist, Baron Carl von Babo, the wine expert at Constantia who was schooled at Klosterneuberg in Austria, not to import any vine material from Europe under any circumstances whatsoever. Cecil John Rhodes, in his usual opportunistic fashion, decided to buy a massive amount of shares in a syndicate that would export wine to Europe, but his opportunism soon backfired when it was realized how poor the wine had become. Bear in mind that production had been halted and farmers had all but closed down business by that stage. Sadly, notwithstanding all attempts to protect the local vines, they were hit. Phylloxera was first noticed in the Mowbray area in 1885, then at Constantia and from there it moved onto the Helderberg area – two of the oldest wine-farming regions were hit. The already shaky wine industry was being kicked whilst they it was down and bankruptcy became the order of the day. Those farmers that remained

instinctively decided to save the vines at all costs and at last there was some benefit from the European experience.  The government appointed a Phylloxera Commission that destroyed all infected vines and tiny compensations were paid with new vines being planted and duly grafted as per the new legislation. Wine farmers the world over helped one another with advice and assistance wherever it was possible – co-operation in adversity.  The Phylloxera was “undefeated but outmanoeuvred” according to Hugh Johnson’s Wine Atlas of the World. The discovery of gold brought the Brits, as usual falling over their feet in their haste to grab everything they could, to the Cape and the Anglo Boer War but soon thereafter this just made matters even worse for the wine industry. The end of the war brought overproduction which caused a slump in prices. Think about this, by 1918 there were almost 87 million vines in the winelands producing an annual 56 million litres of wine. Millions of litres would simply be thrown away! On the

8^th of January 1918 the KWV was eventually formed “to direct, control and regulate the sale and disposal by its members of their produce, being that of the grape …………….“. Their first problem was to persuade the merchants to buy only from them and so, very slowly, the prices started to go up but, unfortunately, everybody didn’t stick to the rules and the beginning years were very difficult.  At one stage 91,000 leaguers of wine was poured into the Eerste River rather than sell it for next to nothing. The KWV had a hell of a time until, in 1924, government ratification was given by the Smuts Government in the form of Act 5 of the Wine and Spirit Control Act of 1924 which empowered the KWV to fix the minimum prices paid to the farmers for their wine. Legal protectionism was vitally necessary at this stage and one shouldn’t shake one’s head in horror – it’s being practiced, quite legally, all over the world. Look at France and champagne – how else will they be able to finance research, their huge estates, expense accounts and necessary  lifestyles? All quite necessary, though, to create the champagne market. The first

really innovative occurrence in the South African history of wine was in 1925 at the farm Welgevallen, the farm of the University of Stellenbosch, when Professor Abraham Izak Perold produced the first Pinotage seedlings – it was momentous in that it was the first locally-bred cultivar, developed from a cross of the Pinot Noir and Cinsaut (commonly known as Hermitage) – the wine made its debut twenty years later. In 1935 the Stellenbosch Farmers Winery was born because an American immigrant, William Charles Winshaw who had initially trained in medicine set the ball rolling. He arrived at the Cape with a consignment of mules that had been order by the then government and remained in South Africa until after the war, at which time he became bewitched by Bacchus and with Gabriel Krige bought Oude Libertas where he, too, started to make and sell wine. Then, in 1940 Act 23 gave the KWV almost total control over the entire industry and they were given the power to fix the minimum price for good wine and in 1945 the Distillers Corporation was formed. And after that?  Well, that’s not history anymore!