The wines of South Africa
From the moment the first vines were planted by a Dutch surgeon in 1659, the South African wine community – much like its wider population – has survived a turbulent 300-year history. The sweet Vin de Constance, which continues to be produced by Klein Constantia today, put the country’s wine growers on the international map in the 18th and 19th centuries but a succession of challenges, from the arrival of phylloxera in the 1860s to the apartheid-driven trade sanctions in the 1980s, left South African wine in the vinous cold until the 1990s.
