Tim James: The German contribution to Cape wine

Recently, within the space of a few days, I visited two historic, neglected wine estates  that are being handsomely invested in and revived by Germans: Alto and Vergenoegd-Löw (the last appendage being the new owner’s surname). I wrote about Alto here, and plan on something about Vergenoegd-Löw – but only after I’ve satisfied an itch prompted by these visits and said something more general about the remarkable, and not much noted, contribution of Germans to the Cape wine industry, from its beginnings to the renewed wave of investment following the turnabout of 1994.

There was a lengthy and remarkably fractious debate in the comments to an 2018 article by historian Joanne Gibson in which she, in passing, minimised the role in local wine history of the “vastly over-hyped French Huguenots”. In a measured intervention to the irritable “debate” that followed, Joanne suggested that: “If anything, in fact, it’s the contribution of the Germans that we REALLY need to talk about… (Cloete, Eksteen, Geldenhuys, Heyns, etc etc…).” Here I’m talking – but it’s a contribution that’s sketchy and incomplete, to say the least.

It is, of course, the Dutch that we know about in the Dutch East India Company’s settlement that got firmly underway in 1652, but there were also a significant number of Germans amongst the Company’s soldiers and servants, and doubtless among the free burghers who started planting vines in the years that followed. Jacobus Cloete from Cologne, for example, whose surname was to be so resonant in the development and fame of Constanta, was amongst the first 17 free burghers, in 1657. Other German settlers followed, and it seems that 5% of the 1000-odd Europeans here in 1691 were of German origin – but, as with the French, they were absorbed into the majority population and never formed a discrete sub-group.

The wine connections of a few of those early German soldier-settlers we do know about. One was Willem Barend Lubbe, who in 1692 began farming a site he called De Wolwedans (apparently having somehow confused the local jackals with European wolves). A romantic name – more so than the Neethlings Hof it became in 1828. That name was contracted to Neethingshof before another German, the financier Hans Joachim Schreiber, bought it in 1985. These days it’s French-owned.

Another VOC German soldier namely Laurens Campher now even has a wine, the white blend, named for him by Muratie, which he farmed from 1685 and was granted ownership of in 1699 – it was then called  De Driesprong. The German presence at Muratie has been strong. Little seems to be known what happened there for the next century, but Muratie says it was owned from 1763 to 1781 by another German immigrant, Martin Melck (a different account I’ve seen says it was owned by Melck’s wife, who apparently also owned Elsenberg, now the place of the agricultural college of that name). More certain is that Melck had been a mercenary employed by the VOC to “keep the natives quiet” where necessary. A longer-term German immigrant owner came in the 20^th century, in the person of George Paul Canitz, good friend of Professor Perold. Some 30 years after his death, his daughter sold the estate in 1987 to Ronnie Melck, fully South African descendant of the 18^th century owner.

The Huguenot settlement of the late 17^th century was something of a once-off French contribution to pre-modern Cape winegrowing, but immigration from the German-speaking parts of Europe continued substantially through the centuries that followed. One significant contribution to the wine industry, that I knew nothing about till I discovered it on the internet as I was working on this piece, is told in the rather poignant tale of Graham Leslie McCallum’s search for the graves of his maternal great-great-great grandparents. They’d come to the Cape in 1859, amongst a 74-strong group of  “German Vinedesser Settlers” and their families, as part of an “aided immigration” scheme that would, it was hoped, strengthen the Cape Colony’s wine industry. I trust it did so, though things were in such poor shape then that it would have taken more than some experienced German viticultural workers to turn them around.

Incidentally, a German-speaker at a rather more exalted level of viticulture arrived at the Cape just a quarter-century later, in 1884. (And at a rather more exalted level of society, the first in a surprisingly large number of Teutonic barons to grace the wine-world at the foot of Africa.) Baron Carl von Babo was a well-known Austrian, trained at the Viticultural School at Klosterneuburg near Vienna, and was appointed as government viticulturist, also acting as manager of the then government-owned winefarm, Groot Constantia.

The 20th century saw a decent influx of Germans investing their money and energy into the now-developed wine industry. Cape wine seems to have offered a particularly warm welcome to Germans, in fact, probably because the white Afrikaners who dominated its higher reaches had been grateful for German support during the British colonial wars against the Boers. I read in RU Kenney’s biography of Perold (himself with a German phD, married to a German, and a member of the Ossewa Brandwag that supported Nazi Germany), that there were so many Germans farming in part of the Stellenbosch area that it was known as Die Deutsche Ecke – “German Corner”. I’d guess that the area might be the Simonsberg. Canitz owned Muratie, while nearby Delheim was bought in 1939 by second-generation German immigrant Hans Hoheisen, who brought in winemaker (and future owner) Spatz Sperling in 1951. Uitkyk was bought in 1929 by another German bearer of the aristocratic “von” – Hans von Carlowitz, whose son George was to establish its reputation for wine.

Move sideways to Paarl, and we find a prime example of important, enduring German influence. The land of the original Nederburg estate was allocated as late as 1792 to a German immigrant, Philippus Wolvaart. Virtually the next significant date in its wine history came in 1937, when the neglected farm was sold to another German immigrant, Johann Graue, who, with his son Arnold, expanded crucially and innovatively – perhaps most notably in promoting the development of cooled fermentation of white wines. The business was merged with Monis in 1956 after Arnold’s tragic death. That was the year that the next German influencer came in, as Nederburg cellarmaster: the illustrious Günter Brözel.

In some cases the close winegrowing relationship between Germany and the Cape was expressed by South Africans going to learn their trade in Germany (remarkably few of those who travelled to learn about wine went to France, by contrast). Among the eminent wine-people who studied at Geisenheim or Weinsburg in the latter-middle decades of the 20^th century are Danie de Wet, Anthonij Rupert, Braam van Velden, Peter Finlayson, Ross Gower and Nicky Krone; there are no doubt many more names for that list (I suspect one of the last South African wine students in Germany was Gottfried Mocke in the 1990s, when more attention was being paid to France, Spain and Italy).

The influence of the German academic origin is revealed not least by the (surely rather absurd) interest in German grape varieties in South Africa (riesling, gewürztraminer, sylvaner, bukettraube and even kerner) including crossings especially bred for a cold climate: it seems the scientists didn’t think that exploring and bringing in Mediterranean varieties would be more useful.

A few of those mentioned above studied at Geisenheim Agricultural Institute under the greatly eminent Dr Hans Ambrosi, ­who also spent over a decade in South Africa, from 1955, working at various wineries, and Nietvoorbij, as an agricultural engineer and consultant. A colleague at Nietvoorbij (though I’m not sure of his connections with Germany) was Hermann Kirschbaum, the fine winemaker for many years at Buitenverwachting.

That Constantia winery, bought in its dereliction by German couple Richard and Christine Müller in 1981 and restored to glory, marks a bridge to the most recent period of German interest and investment in the South African wine industry, most of which took place after the collapse of formal apartheid, in 1994. That’s a bit easier to explore, and I shall do so soon – having already rambled on here more than lengthily enough.

• Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution appeared in 2013.