A Short History of Constantia: The Cape's First Great Wine

Every great wine region has an origin story. Constantia is the origin story.

You've just met the valley as it is now — the winelands you're already in, twenty minutes from the city. This part winds the clock back three and a half centuries, because the reason Constantia matters isn't just that it's convenient. It's that everything South African wine became started here, on these sea-facing slopes, before anywhere else in the country had planted a serious vine. To drink Constantia is to drink the source.

Long before the rest of the Cape had a name, Constantia was the wine the world wanted. This is where the whole story begins.

The founder and the farm

Begin with one man and one grant. In 1685 Simon van der Stel — the Dutch East India Company's governor at the Cape, and no small ego — was given a vast tract of land on the cool eastern flank of the mountain behind Table Mountain. He named it Constantia, planted vineyards, and set about proving that the Cape could make wine worth the long voyage back to Europe.

He was right, though it took time. Van der Stel farmed Constantia until he died in 1712, and by then the place had a working cellar and a reputation forming. What he'd really done was pick the ground. The slopes he chose — granite, sea-cooled, angled to the morning sun — are still the reason the wine tastes the way it does. Three centuries of winemakers have essentially been refining a site he read correctly on sight.

How one farm became a valley

Here's the piece that explains all the shared names. After Van der Stel's death the great estate was sold and, within a few years, carved up — into Groot ("great") Constantia, Klein ("little") Constantia, and Bergvliet. That single subdivision is why Groot Constantia, Klein Constantia and Buitenverwachting all trace back to one root. They were one farm, then they were several.

The golden age came with the Cloete family. When Hendrik Cloete bought Groot Constantia in 1778, he threw everything at the sweet wine — better vineyards, cleaner cellars, careful late picking — and turned a good local product into an international sensation. Within a generation, the wine simply called "Constantia" was being shipped to the courts of Europe and set on the same tables as the first growths of Bordeaux and the great sweet wines of the Rhine. Not bad for a farm at the bottom of Africa. The full story of that bottle is its own chapter — and it's the one everyone remembers.

The fall

Then it all came apart, the way these stories tend to: slowly, then all at once.

Powdery mildew crept into Cape vineyards in the 1860s and knocked yields back. Worse was coming. In the 1880s phylloxera — the root-feeding louse that had already levelled the vineyards of Europe — reached the Cape and worked through Constantia's vines with the same grim efficiency. At the same moment the economics collapsed: Britain, the great export market, dropped the preferential tariffs that had made Cape wine pay. Disease from below, markets from above. By the end of the 19th century the famous sweet wine had simply stopped being made.

The old estates limped on or changed hands. The Cape government bought Groot Constantia in the 1880s and ran it as an experimental farm; a fire gutted the manor house in 1925, and it was rebuilt as the museum you can walk through today. But the wine that had made the valley's name was gone, surviving only in dusty old bottles and the pages of European novels.

The long sleep, and the slow return

For most of the 20th century Constantia sold its history rather than its wine. The vines that remained made honest, ordinary bottles; the legend gathered dust.

The turn came in the 1980s, and it came from Klein Constantia. New owners replanted the historic Muscat de Frontignan on the original slopes, rebuilt the sweet wine from first principles, and released a first modern vintage — widely cited as 1986 — that proved the ground still had it in it. Groot Constantia later answered with its own historic-style sweet wine, Grand Constance. And around those two revivals, the rest of the valley found a second identity: not the sweet wine of the past, but taut, cool-climate Sauvignon Blanc for the present. Steenberg, whose 1682 grant makes it the valley's oldest farm of all, became a name for crisp whites and Cap Classique. The estates you can visit today are the result of that forty-year rebuild.

So the history hands you a paradox to carry into the next glass. The most modern thing about Constantia — its sharp, sea-driven whites — grows on the oldest wine ground in the country. And the oldest thing about it, the sweet wine that started the fame, is also its most improbable comeback.

That comeback is the next stop. Part 3 — Vin de Constance: The Legend, Revived takes the wine you've watched rise and fall across three centuries and shows you what it actually is: how it's made, why it seduced Napoleon and Jane Austen, and where to taste the resurrected bottle for yourself.