Constantia Wine Route: Vineyards, Empire and Cape Food Culture

On the far side of Table Mountain from central Cape Town, the land drops into a green bowl of vineyards, oak avenues and white-gabled farmhouses, closed in on one side by the Constantiaberg and open on the other to the light of False Bay. This is the Constantia valley, where a Dutch governor planted vines in the 1680s and where, a century later, a sweet wine was made that found its way onto the tables of European kings and into the pages of Jane Austen. The Constantia wine route that runs through it today is often sold as an afternoon of tastings, but it is better read as a story of empire, labour, trade and food. On our Southern Africa Tour, the group spends the afternoon of Day 2 here, after a morning at Cape Point.

A governor’s farm behind the mountain

The Dutch East India Company (the VOC) founded its station at the Cape in 1652 to feed its ships, and for its first decades the settlement clung to the shore of Table Bay. Simon van der Stel arrived as commander in 1679, at the moment the Castle of Good Hope was being completed, and he set about turning a supply post into a farming colony. On 13 July 1685 he received title to 891 morgen of land behind the mountain, roughly 763 hectares, and named it Constantia.

Nobody is quite sure why. One explanation, put forward by the historian Anna Böeseken, is that the name honoured the daughter of the visiting VOC commissioner who confirmed the grant. Another is the Latin sense of the word, constancy, at a time when allegorical names were fashionable. Either way, Van der Stel used the farm for vines, fruit, vegetables and cattle, built a country house on it in 1692, and, after retiring as governor in 1699, lived there until he died in 1712.

The Khoikhoi herders of the Cape Peninsula had grazed their cattle across this country long before any of it was surveyed into farms, and the growth of estates like Constantia was part of the steady loss of their land. Our history of South Africa for travellers traces how that process unfolded across the colony.

Slopes, sea air and the shape of the valley

Van der Stel chose well. The vineyards of Constantia climb the slopes of the Constantiaberg in a kind of amphitheatre that opens towards False Bay. By South African standards the valley is cool: altitude and breezes off both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean temper the summer heat, and some vineyards reach around 400 metres above sea level, among the highest and steepest in the country. The soils are deeply weathered and rich in clay, which holds water through the dry Cape summer.

Those conditions suit white grapes that need to keep their freshness. Sauvignon blanc is now the most important variety here, at just under a third of the vines, with semillon and chardonnay also doing well. In the eighteenth century it was muscat that mattered most, for reasons that become clear further down the road.

Dividing the estate: Groot Constantia, Klein Constantia and Bergvliet

Van der Stel’s will called for the estate to be sold, and in 1714 it was divided and auctioned in three parts. The portion with his buildings became Groot Constantia (groot simply means large), and the others became Klein Constantia and Bergvliet. Captain Oloff Bergh took possession of Groot Constantia in 1716. When he died, his widow Anna de Koningh became its first female owner.

She was not the first woman to hold land in the valley. Below Steenberg mountain, at its southern end, a German widow named Catharina Ras, who had reached the Cape alone in 1662, obtained title from Van der Stel to the farm she called Swaaneweide, the feeding place of the swans. The Cape Town Museum counts her as the first female landowner at the Cape. Her farm is the ancestor of today’s Steenberg estate.

Groot Constantia’s great period began in December 1778, when Hendrik Cloete bought it. Three generations of his family would hold it until 1885. Cloete planted widely and rebuilt on a grand scale, extending the manor house and adding a wine cellar with the help of the architect Louis Michel Thibault. The cellar’s pediment, carved by the sculptor Anton Anreith, carries the date 1791. Anreith and Thibault were the same pair who gave the Castle of Good Hope its Baroque Kat Balcony a few years earlier, and the Cloete cellar is one of the finest pieces of Cape Dutch architecture to survive.

The sweet wine that reached Europe’s tables

What made Constantia famous was a sweet wine made from Muscat de Frontignan, the small-berried muscat grape. Under Cloete and his successors it became one of the most celebrated and expensive sweet wines in the world. Its admirers are said to have included Frederick the Great, George IV, Louis-Philippe and Otto von Bismarck, and Napoleon is reported to have drunk it in exile on St Helena. It also crossed into literature. In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Constantia wine is offered as a comfort to the heartbroken Marianne Dashwood; Charles Dickens mentions it in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Charles Baudelaire wrote of it too.

The wine collected medals as well as admirers, at international exhibitions in Paris in 1855, 1867 and 1878, in Vienna in 1874, in Philadelphia in 1876 and in Melbourne in 1881. For a remote farm at the southern tip of Africa, the reach was remarkable. It was made possible by the same sea lanes that had brought the VOC to the Cape in the first place: ships calling at Table Bay carried casks onward to Europe and Asia.

Who worked the vineyards of Constantia?

The wealth of the Constantia estates was built on slavery. Enslaved people, brought to the Cape by the VOC from Madagascar, Mozambique, India and the Indonesian archipelago, cleared the land, planted and pruned the vines, picked the grapes and worked the cellars. Van der Stel’s own will provided for some of the people he had enslaved to be freed. Hendrik Cloete bought 16 enslaved people from the previous owner’s estate in 1792 and added 16 more. Slavery was abolished at the Cape in 1834, but those freed were bound as “apprentices” to their former owners until 1838.

The manor house at Groot Constantia now tells part of this story directly. Its exhibition, run by Iziko Museums, focuses on rural slavery and the lives of enslaved people in the early colonial Cape. One object that once spoke to that history is gone: the estate’s slave bell, cast in 1716, was stolen in September 2024 and has not been recovered.

Decline, fire and revival

The golden age did not last. Economic shifts weakened the market, Jacob Pieter Cloete was declared insolvent in 1872, and in the late nineteenth century the vine pest phylloxera devastated the Cape’s vineyards. Production of the old sweet wine stopped, and the exact methods used to make it were lost. On 1 October 1885 the Cape Government bought Groot Constantia for £5,275 and ran it as an experimental wine farm.

In December 1925 a fire gutted the manor house. It was restored in its original Cape Dutch style by the architect F. K. Kendall and opened as a museum in 1927. The house was proclaimed a national monument in 1936, and in 1993 the estate passed to the Groot Constantia Trust, a non-profit that holds it for the nation. It is still a working wine farm, and the Groot Constantia Trust calls it the oldest wine estate in South Africa.

The sweet wine came back by a different route. In 1980 Duggie Jooste bought Klein Constantia and, with the winemaker Ross Gower and the viticulturist Chris Orffer, set out to recreate it. Muscat vines were planted in 1983, and the first vintage, in 1986, produced 950 half-litre bottles that were never sold commercially. Groot Constantia resumed its own sweet wine, Grand Constance, in 2003.

What is Vin de Constance, and can you still taste it?

Vin de Constance is Klein Constantia’s modern recreation of the historic Constantia sweet wine, and it is still made today. It comes entirely from Muscat de Frontignan grapes picked very ripe, in several passes, and it is not fortified: fermentation stops naturally because of the high sugar. Some batches are fermented on their skins, and the wine is aged in barrel for several years. Whether it is poured on a given afternoon depends on which estates the group visits, so ask your Tour Leader on the day.

Constantia at the table: the roots of Cape food culture

The Cape’s food tells the same layered story as its wine. The VOC station existed to grow vegetables and raise meat for passing fleets, and the farms of Constantia were part of that larger kitchen. But the cooking that most marks the Cape came from the people who did the work. Enslaved and exiled people brought from Indonesia, Malaysia and India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried their spices and techniques with them, and many enslaved women cooked in Dutch households, softening their recipes for European tastes, replacing chilli with paprika, for example.

The result is what is now called Cape Malay cooking, rooted in the Islamic culinary tradition of a Muslim community that settled in the Bo-Kaap in the early nineteenth century. Its dishes are found on Cape Town menus today: bredie, a slow stew of lamb and vegetables whose name is Malay in origin; denningvleis, lamb braised with cloves, nutmeg and vinegar; yellow rice with raisins; and koeksisters, fried dough soaked in syrup. Sweet and sour, spiced and slow-cooked, it is food that pairs naturally with Constantia’s wines. The group drives through the Bo-Kaap the following day.

The Constantia wine route today

The modern route is a cluster of estates within Cape Town itself. The route’s own association lists ten farms; among them are Groot Constantia, Klein Constantia, Buitenverwachting, Steenberg, Constantia Glen, Eagles’ Nest and Beau Constantia, the last of these perched at Constantia Nek with views over False Bay. Constantia Uitsig is another well-known name in the valley.

Rather than trying to taste through a list, it helps to read the valley in layers. Groot Constantia holds the history: the manor house museum, the Cloete cellar under Anreith’s pediment and the row of outbuildings called the Jonkershuis, all set among old oaks. Klein Constantia holds the revival of the sweet wine. The newer estates on the upper slopes show how the valley has turned towards cool-climate whites. The tour itinerary describes the afternoon as a half-day on the Constantia wine route and does not commit to particular estates in advance.

Do I need to drink wine to enjoy the Constantia afternoon?

No. Much of what makes Constantia worth visiting is history and landscape: the Cape Dutch architecture, the oak-lined grounds, the views to False Bay and, at Groot Constantia, a museum that tells the story of the estate and the enslaved people who worked it. Nobody is expected to taste more than they wish, and the history alone fills an afternoon.

How much walking does the Constantia visit involve?

Very little, compared with other days on the tour. The group travels by air-conditioned coach between estates, and a wine estate visit typically means short walks between the car park, cellar, tasting room and gardens, sometimes on gravel or cobbles. It follows a morning at Cape Point, so the day as a whole is a full one. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate), which means managing three to five hours of activity a day, walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground, climbing stairs and carrying your own luggage.

What will the vineyards look like when the tour visits?

Expect the end of the Cape winter rather than the harvest. The tour’s departures run from 29 August to 15 September 2027 and from 27 August to 13 September 2028, when the Cape’s winter rains are easing into spring. The grape harvest falls months later, in late summer, so the vines will be pruned back rather than heavy with fruit, and the valley at its greenest.

Constantia on the Southern Africa route

Day 2 of the tour pairs two sides of the Cape. The morning is spent at Cape Point and the Good Hope Nature Reserve, where the shipwreck coast shows why a safe anchorage and a supply station mattered so much to the VOC. After lunch at Seaforth, the afternoon turns inland to Constantia, and the day ends with a group dinner. On Day 3 the group visits the Castle of Good Hope, where Van der Stel governed, along with Table Mountain, the Company’s Garden and the Bo-Kaap.

From Cape Town the route heads east into the Klein Karoo and along the Garden Route, then north to Johannesburg, Kruger, Victoria Falls and Chobe. Our overview of the Southern Africa cultural journey shows how the Cape’s maritime and farming beginnings connect to the rest of the route, and our guide to exploring Southern Africa gives a broader introduction to the region.

A glass of Constantia wine is a small thing to hold, but it contains a great deal: a governor’s ambitions, the work of people who were never paid for it, the trade routes of a global company and the tastes of European courts. Standing among the vines with the Constantiaberg above and False Bay in the distance, it is a fine place to begin understanding how the Cape was made.