What is Altydgedacht best known for?

Age and nerve. The farm dates to 1698 and has stayed with the Parker family for six generations — one of the oldest continuously worked wine properties in the country. But plenty of Cape estates are old. What sets this one apart is what it chose to plant: Altydgedacht was among the first here to bottle Barbera, Piedmont's high-acid red, as a varietal, and it makes one of South Africa's few serious dry Gewürztraminers. Old farm, contrarian cellar.

Where is Altydgedacht and how do you get there?

On the seaward slopes of the Tygerberg, in the Durbanville ward on Cape Town's northern edge — roughly twenty-five to thirty minutes from the city centre, less from the northern suburbs. This is the winelands' convenience play: no committed hour-long drive to Stellenbosch, just a short run up a hill most people never think to climb. Easiest half-day escape out of the city there is.

Do you need to book a tasting?

Book ahead over summer and on weekends, and definitely if you're bringing a group. Otherwise it stays low-key. Check the estate's own site for current tasting-room details and to reserve.

Is the Barbera worth trying if you have never had one?

It's the reason to come. Barbera is rare enough in South Africa that a good Cape example is a small event in itself — and this is the estate's calling card: bright, savoury, high-acid, built for the table, and nothing like the Cabernet and Shiraz growing next to it. Start here, then work back to the reds you already know.

Altydgedacht Estate

Most visitors drive straight past the hill. That's their loss and your shortcut. Half an hour from central Cape Town, up on the seaward slopes of the Tygerberg in the Durbanville ward, sits a farm that was granted at the end of the seventeenth century and has never left the Parker family since. Six generations. One of the oldest continuously worked wine properties in the country — and, of all the things it could have become, the Cape's unlikely home for Barbera and dry Gewürztraminer.

The name is old Dutch for something close to "always remembered" — the sentimental flourish of a settler-era farmer who had no intention of letting the land go. Three centuries on, the family still hasn't.

The Parkers, and what long tenure does to a farm

Six generations on one piece of ground does something to a cellar. While much of the Cape changed hands, chased whatever was selling, or got folded into some larger portfolio, this farm stayed put — an unbroken line that's rare even among South Africa's old estates. Tenure like that breeds a temperament: patient, a touch stubborn, happy to plant grapes that make no commercial sense because someone once decided they'd grow well here.

And that's the whole story of the place. The Parkers could have planted the reliable sellers and called it a day. Instead they went to Piedmont for a red almost nobody else in the country was bottling, and to the aromatic edge of the spectrum for a white most warm-climate growers won't touch. This is a farm that used its three centuries to get interesting rather than just old.

The Cape has plenty of estates older than a century. It has very few that spent the time becoming curious.

Start with the Barbera — nobody else here makes one

Barbera is the reason to point the car up the hill. Altydgedacht was among the first South African producers to bottle Piedmont's high-acid red as a varietal, and it's still one of a bare handful of Cape estates you can reliably tie to the grape. Deep-coloured, bright, savoury, built for the dinner table rather than the trophy shelf — seek it out here precisely because you can seek it out almost nowhere else.

Then the white that shouldn't work in this hemisphere. Gewürztraminer — all lychee and rose — is notoriously hard to ripen without it going flabby and blowsy. Durbanville's cool, sea-fed slopes hand it the acidity to keep its nerve, and Altydgedacht makes a dry version, which is the harder, better trick with a grape most growers shove toward sweetness. Pour it for anyone who swears they don't like perfumed whites.

Around these two sits a spine of classic Cape reds — Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Pinotage — plus the Italian-leaning flagship blend, the Tintoreto, which folds the Barbera instinct into something more structured and built to age. Durbanville's broader name, though, is made on whites: this is Sauvignon Blanc country, and the ward's maritime cool is what lets both that grape and these aromatic whites hold their line. For the full picture of the appellation, see our guide to Durbanville wine.

The setting

Durbanville is the winelands' convenience secret. Stellenbosch and Franschhoek are an hour off and a committed day out; Altydgedacht is barely half an hour from town, on hills nobody thinks to climb. The Tygerberg's seaward slopes catch the same cool air and afternoon cloud that roll in off Table Bay, and on a clear day the view runs back across the city bowl to the mountain.

It's unpretentious in the best way — a working farm first, a tasting stop second, with none of the polished theatre of the grand estates. Come for the wine and the quiet, not for a wedding-venue lawn.

Visiting

Tastings are poured in the estate's tasting room, vineyards and the Tygerberg behind the glass. It's a low-key stop that strings naturally with the other Durbanville estates along the hills, and because it's so close to the city, it's the ideal first or last call on a half-day loop rather than a full expedition. Book ahead over summer and on weekends, and confirm current tasting-room details on the estate's own site before you set out.

What to buy

One bottle home: the Barbera. It's the estate's whole argument, and a Cape rarity you'll struggle to match anywhere else. The dry Gewürztraminer is the counterpoint — the wine to convert a perfumed-white sceptic. And if you want something to lay down, the Tintoreto is the estate at full stretch, an Italian idea given a Durbanville accent.