I promised you a literary January. Continuing the bookish theme, let’s pick up where we left off last week: Michael Stevenson’s volume on the artist Samuel Daniell. In his foreword to that book, historian Nigel Penn compares the collection of Daniell’s work to the rediscovery of a similarly valuable colonial visual archive: the drawings and paintings of Dutchman Jan Brandes, who travelled to Batavia, Ceylon and the Cape towards the end of the 18th century.
Brandes provides us with the earliest known representation of a Cape farm building that is still standing. In 1786, he lived at Vergenoegd, near the mouth of the Eerste River on the False Bay coast. While there, he made three watercolour panoramas that are displayed in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. One of these shows Vergenoegd’s original werf, including the farmstead and outbuildings as they can be seen today.
It was this architectural continuity that caught the attention of Peter Löw, a German entrepreneur, academic and philanthropist, whose European Heritage Project has been responsible for restoring dozens of castles and palaces across Europe. Vergenoegd was admittedly an outlier in such an undertaking, but “Cape Dutch” was sufficient qualification. Löw purchased the farm in 2015 and has, since then, ploughed enormous resources not only into its buildings but also into its agricultural practices, its culinary reputation (boosted by a partnership with acclaimed chef Bertus Basson) and its leisure offerings.
This is the recent history that is covered in the second half of Joanne Gibson’s book Vergenoegd Löw: Reds, Racehorses and Runner Ducks — an African Wine Journey from 1696. Gibson’s detailed account of the past decade culminates in a celebration of what the farm has become. An emphasis on sustainability (continuing a trajectory started under the previous owners, the Faure family, who introduced the pest-controlling “runner ducks”) is matched with an ambition to create globally recognised wines under winemaker Vusi Dalicuba.
Viticulture at Vergenoegd Löw is shaped by a unique combination of conditions: proximity to the sea, low-lying vineyards, lime-rich soil, relatively low rainfall for a terroir that is also cooled by exposure to the southeaster, and regular flooding of the vineyards when the Eerste River rises. All in all, as Gibson puts it, “the life of a grapevine on Vergenoegd Löw Wine Estate is not an easy one”.
Yet the grapes grown here have produced much-admired wines for more than three centuries. When Dalicuba — who has already been awarded for his 2022 Vergenoegd Löw Amalie Merlot — achieves his stated aim of becoming “the best winemaker in South Africa and even the world”, he will not be the first black vintner from the Cape to achieve international renown. Here the story gets intriguing.
From an artistic and archaeological perspective, the Brandes panoramas and Vergenoegd’s built environment are certainly significant. But what Gibson (a wine writer with a penchant for historical detective cases) has uncovered about an earlier period in the farm’s history is even more interesting in terms of the wider Cape colonial narrative.
In 1740, Vergenoegd was acquired by Johannes Colijn; 16 years previously, he had married Johanna Appel, whose parents had owned the farm for many years. And who was Colijn? Only the maker of the most famous wine on the planet at the time. Vin de Constance, Capp Constancia, Constanze — call it what you will, in the 1700s the great and the good (and the not-so-good) desired above all else the red and white wines made at Constantia. It also happens that Colijn was black; his mother was “Swarte” Maria Everts, who had been born into slavery.
So high was the demand, and so limited the area under planting at Constantia, that Colijn and colleagues must have had access to other grapes and other barrels of wine. Various theories have been floated over the years, but Gibson introduces the most convincing of all: that Colijn, his extended family and subsequently his children carefully acquired a series of neighbouring farms, from Vergenoegd to Spier, to supply “Constantia” wine to the world.
Gibson has, for some years, been advocating against the erasure of Colijn and other black winemakers and farm owners from the Cape’s early history. Her beautiful book on Vergenoegd Löw further contributes to this revision.
This article was first published in Business Day.
