Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
shaded dark red are the premises of wine merchants, whose businesses had a long-established
pedigree in Cape Town and a prominent place in its economy.
The first people to produce wine at the Cape were Dutch colonists of the late 17th century,
who discovered that the area's Mediterranean climate was perfect for cultivating grapes. The
arrival of French Huguenot immigrants with expertise in winemaking fostered the develop-
ment of the fledgling industry. When the British took control of the Cape Colony during the
Napoleonic Wars, they soon discovered the advantages of controlling a land where grapes
were grown. Not since the English kings had lost their territories in south-western France in
the 15th century had wealthy Britons enjoyed such secure access to a source of good wine.
French imports were heavily taxed, and often unobtainable due to war between the two coun-
tries. Conversely, customs duties favoured wines from Britain's ally, Portugal. A glass of port
had become the traditional end to an upper-class Englishman's dinner.
Although import taxes on Cape wine were reduced to encourage trade with the mother
country, the wine merchants of Cape Town remained frustrated by the practical difficulties of
exporting their wares. The colony's governor, Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole, seems to have been
sympathetic to the wine industry, since he revised the licensing and export regulations in its
favour in 1832. What he could not do with his limited budget was to pay the £567 needed to
build a new stone pier near Amsterdam Battery. This was desperately needed to replace the
old and inconvenient jetty by the Castle of Good Hope. Cole wrote to London on 8 March
1833 to explain the situation, enclosing this map in his letter to illustrate the city's geography.
Despite such complaints, from traders and other workers employed in the industry, this
period subsequently proved to have been a golden age for Cape wine. Three decades later,
in the 1860s, the industry nearly collapsed under the triple impact of the oidium fungus, the
phylloxera pest, and a trading agreement between the United Kingdom and France that ended
preferential treatment for imports from the Cape. By the time that the wine trade recovered in
the late 1880s, the balance of economic power in southern Africa had shifted to the interior,
to the goldfields of the Witwatersrand and the new city of Johannesburg. Cape Town's era of
dominance was over.
