“the winelands” is a mysterious area so geographically uncertain that no one really knows where it begins or ends. Constantia? Rawsonville? Swartland? Somerset West? Google it or punch it into your GPS, and you’re bound to get nowhere. Equally unclear is its chronology. Beginning in the 18th century, it now incorporates communities, golf courses, and pseudo-French revivalism.

To understand the multifaceted, double-barrelled phrase “The Winelands”, it helps to go back in time to the year 1648 when the Dutch ship Haerlem was driven ashore at Bloubergstrand, with its cargo intact. Expecting a long wait before a rescue ship would find them, the crew settled next to a stream of fresh water in what is today Cape Town’s city bowl. They cleared the indigenous vegetation, began to barter for food with the local population, and grew vegetables from seeds that they had managed to salvage from the ship.

Their survival thus guaranteed, they were found in relatively good spirits six months later. Their report to the authorities included a recommendation to grow vegetables at the Cape to provide provisions for passing ships. When Jan van Riebeeck and his expedition landed three years later, he was instructed by his employers at the Dutch East India Company: “As soon as you are in a proper stage of defence you shall search for the best place for gardens, the best and fattest ground in which everything planted or sown will thrive well.”

The wording sounds harmless, but the instruction became the blueprint for the colonisation of the Cape, valid until quite recently: Expropriate the indigenous population from the most fertile land, erect defence lines, and substitute native vegetation with plantations of alien fruits and vegetables.

Jan van Riebeeck and his chief gardener Hendrik Boom immediately put the instructions into effect, laying out the 16ha Company Gardens, which included a vineyard, a few remains of which survive on the Queen Victoria Street side of the gardens. On 2 February 1659 Van Riebeeck wrote in his diary: “Fine warm weather … Today, praise be the Lord, wine was made for the first time from Cape grapes … The grapes were mostly muscadel, and other white round grapes, very fragrant and tasty ...”

The success of the first “winelands” enticed the authorities to shift the concept out of the town centre to the upper reaches of the Liesbeek River, where thousands of vines were planted on Wine Hill (Wynberg). Further afield, and still outside the confines of the Colony demarcations, was the Woeste Veld (deserted bushland) of today’s Cape Peninsula. It was Governor Simon van der Stel, namesake of both Simon’s Town and Stellenbosch, who would assess the soil quality of that Woeste Veld by having his workers

dig up samples all along the peninsula’s False Bay coastline, before setting his eyes on the Constantia Valley, still home to the oldest wine estates in the country.

The formula worked and drew more and more settlers, and with them many more slaves. Repeating and accelerating the process, it was not long before the good soils on the other side of the less fertile Cape Flats towards the interior of the country were partitioned as well. The Cape now consisted of two areas of European domination: Cape Town with its coastline and port, and the interior with its farms. Areas falling outside these categories, and which were then still mainly inhabited by indigenous cattle herders, were considered beyond the grace of civilisation. In 1816 when Napoleon’s secretary, Count de Las Cases, stayed at the estate of Alltydgedacht in today’s Durbanville, he described himself, full of pathos, as “being removed to the very extremity of the civilised world” in “the desert of the Tygerberg”.

In the early 19th century, “The Winelands” still functioned as a buffer, and a border between “civilisation” and the “Woeste Veld”. It was only a few years later, when the Boers left the Cape to trek into the Highveld to shift their farming methods from horticulture to cattle herding, that the “Winelands” concept was left behind, like an endearing toy, too difficult to take along on the next adventure. With the economic and political power shifting towards Johannesburg and Pretoria, the Winelands lost their earlier connotation as civilised outposts on the fringes of the Woeste Veld. The fact that for us “The Winelands” still extend much further than their physical vineyards, suggests the continuing impact this area has on our mental and emotional geography. The Winelands are still very much a landscape one can feel, a place where the rhythm is different from the rest of the country, and where South Africa’s colonial past comes alive in its most visually appealing form.

Built to lastCentral to the beauty of the Winelands is its Cape Dutch architecture. Spanning from the first humble colonial constructions to its generic manifestations in modern-day security compounds and shopping malls, this architectural style, as coherent as it feels, is not confined to one era. Its roots may lie in European Renaissance and Baroque, but due to its remote location in the buffer land between civilisation and the Woeste Veld, it is rather like a clean canvas, or an emptied landscape, that lends itself to individual manifestations. Apart from a loose European tradition, Cape Dutch reflects the feelings and beliefs of those who drew up the plans (often the owners of the farms themselves, who had little contact with architecture other than what they saw in the Cape) and were

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To say “The Winelands” evokes an image of a manor house with whitewashed walls, thatched roof and ornate gables, shaded by oak trees and surrounded by neatly arranged vineyards… and with it, almost inevitably, comes an expansive sense of luxury, historical depth and feelings of calm abundance.

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