A WINE farmer told me recently that a student selling a bottle of wine at a restaurant will receive more in selling that wine, than the farmer does who produced it.
Times are not easy for our local wine farmers, what with high input costs, the depreciating currency, dwindling export markets and the perennial shortage of labour.
Interestingly enough, Cape wine farmers had the very same concerns in the early 1800’s. In a single generation farmers would have experienced one of the industry’s largest booms followed by one of its most depressing slumps.
This particular drama began to unfold at the end of the 1700s. War between the Netherlands and Britain had disrupted the Cape’s money supply, and to compensate for the shortage in minted coins, the government began to print money.
The Riksdaalder devalued, and prices at the Cape soared. It was also very costly to transport wine to the market in Cape Town.
A round trip to Cape Town from Drakenstein took four days. So if an average farm produced 30 leaguers of wine a year(a leaguer is 727 litres), that would mean 15 trips, and at four days a trip every two months and a commitment of labour, vehicle and oxen.
The poor conditions of the roads also resulted in breakdowns. Apart from the normal wear and tear on a wagon, oxen often died from sheer exhaustion.
Then there was the matter of using slave labour. Wine farming was labour intensive, and based on a steady supply of slave labour.
In Europe public sentiment had turned against the use of slave labour, and by 1807 the British government did not allow any British ships or British subjects to trade in slaves. So the number of slaves imported to the Cape began to dwindle.
Then came the Napoleonic Wars and an unprecedented windfall when Napoleon decided to blockade European ports, cutting off Britain’s supply of wine from the Continent.
So the British started importing wine from the Cape, and because the Cape was also a British colony, the British government lowered import duties on Cape wine in 1813 to stimulate the industry.
At the Cape, wine prices and production rose and exports to Britain increased. Life was good, and farmers mortgaged their farms to plant more vineyards and gentrify their homesteads.
In 1816 - at the peak of the boom - Cape wine was sold for £40 a leaguer in Britain, and even when prices stabilised around £23, the high volumes ensured a steady flow of money back to the Cape.
Then peace was declared in 1815. Britain’s traditional wine suppliers were back in business, and they had no need for the Cape’s wine. In 1816 prices dropped to £16 and in 1830 they fluctuated between £9 and £14.
To add insult to injury the British declared that Cape wine – with the exception of Constantia – was undrinkable, and the British government scrapped the preferential tariffs system to howls of protest at the Cape.
Wine farmers had doubled their plantings between 1814 and 1825. Now they were left without an export market, and had enormous debts to pay off.
Then in 1838 farmers lost (for practical purposes) their entire labour force when slaves were freed. They soon discovered that their former slaves would not for love or money, return to working on the farms.
In January 1840 a Paarl farmer JC Voigt complained in De Zuid-Afrikaan that he did not have enough labour to harvest his wine grapes, and appealed to the government for some intervention.
But the harvest did not wait, so farmers and their families, and a much reduced labour forced, harvested what they could.
In London the Children’s Friend Society sent 750 homeless children to the Cape to work on the farms. Most of the boys were about 14 years old, and were contracted to the farmers for a period of six years.
Economically speaking, the local market once more became the mainstay of the industry. Fortunately, the Cape colony was expanding, and with it, a stable demand for brandy. Many of Paarl’s brandy companies originated at this time.
The industry did experience a brief respite in the 1850s when an outbreak of oidium or powdery mildew all but wiped out wine crops throughout France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Madeira.
History, as always, makes for interesting reading, but as someone once said: if you don’t understand the lessons of the past, you are doomed to repeat them in the future.
