Why is it called Constantia? A history of the Cape's oldest vineyards

The grant of 1685

Van der Stel arrived at the Cape as the Company's commander on 12 October 1679. On 13 July 1685 he received title to 891 morgen, about 763 hectares, in a grant made by Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein, Lord of Mijdrecht, a Company commissioner who spent three months at the Cape that year. South African History Online records that Van der Stel built a plain country house there in 1692, retired in 1699 and lived at Constantia until he died on 24 June 1712.

The farm was run as a business from the start, with vines, fruit, vegetables and wheat, and Groot Constantia now describes itself as South Africa's oldest wine-producing farm. The name spread from that single farm to the estates carved out of it after Van der Stel's death, then to the suburb that grew around them, and in Europe it became the name of a wine.

The case for a commissioner's daughter

1. Van Goens's daughter

The most widely repeated explanation is that Van der Stel named the farm after Constantia, a daughter of Commissioner Rijckloff van Goens. South African History Online, following the historian Dr A. J. Boeseken, calls this "most probably" the origin and describes Van Goens as the official who made the original grant, which Van Reede later confirmed. Groot Constantia's own history is more cautious and says only that Van der Stel "possibly" had Van Goens's daughter in mind.

2. Van Reede's "little daughter"

A second version names a different father. Writing in the journal Historia in 1970, M. Whiting Spilhaus stated that Van der Stel named the valley after Van Reede's "little daughter", who had died at Colombo in Ceylon. South African History Online's biography of Van der Stel follows this line and says the name was chosen "to honour the memory of Van Rheede's daughter", so the same site gives two different fathers on two different pages. Neither account quotes a letter or a Company record in which Van der Stel explains himself, and both rest on the fact that the grant passed through the hands of these two men.

The other three stories

3. The Latin word constantia

The Latin word constantia means constancy or steadfastness, and a moral name of this kind would have been unremarkable in the 1680s. South African History Online presents the meaning as a possible "additional reason", on the grounds that allegorical names were popular at the time. Groot Constantia's own history goes further and says Van der Stel "likely" chose the name for the Latin word, because he valued constancy and steadfastness.

4. A Company ship called Constantia

The estate also lists a Company ship called Constantia as a possible source. It names no voyage or date, and we have not been able to identify a Company vessel of that name at the Cape before 1685, which makes this the weakest of the explanations still in circulation.

5. Van der Stel's wife

Where the evidence stands

The two daughter stories are tied to the officials who made and confirmed the grant, although they cannot both be right. The estate itself favours the Latin meaning, and no published document settles the question either way. The ship remains unproven, and no voyage has been traced.

The name theories side by side

Who worked the vineyards

The farm was built and run by enslaved people. Iziko Museums' research on slavery at the Cape records about 22 enslaved people working at Constantia by 1688, sixteen more bought from India, Bali and Madagascar in 1695, and 60 living and working on the farm by 1709. Their work included picking and treading the grapes, weeding and preparing the casks.

After Van der Stel's death the estate was divided and sold at auction, and the portion with his buildings, which became Groot Constantia, passed to Captain Oloff Bergh. Hendrik Cloete bought Groot Constantia in 1778, and his family kept it until 1885. A teachers' guide on Constantia, produced by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation from a 2005 oral history project, puts Cloete's labour force in 1788 at 50 enslaved people and 20 Khoi servants. By 1819 there were 74 enslaved people at Groot Constantia, 25 of them under the age of 16, and the 1816 records list skilled winemakers, coopers, carpenters, masons and cooks among them. Slavery at the Cape ended in 1834, followed by four years of forced "apprenticeship" to the same owners, and the guide points out that the owners were compensated while the people they had enslaved received nothing.

Constantia wine in Europe

Constantia wine seems to have reached Europe in the 1720s, according to the wine writer Stephen Brook in Decanter, who counts it among the most famous and expensive sweet wines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hendrik Cloete built a new cellar, with a pediment by the sculptor Anton Anreith dated 1791, and South African History Online credits him with making Constantia wine famous abroad. Wines of South Africa and the estate name Frederick the Great of Prussia and King Louis Philippe of France among its buyers, and Iziko Museums records that Napoleon was supplied with Constantia wine during his exile on St Helena.

The wine also appears in two nineteenth-century English novels. In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, Mrs Jennings brings a glass for the heartbroken Marianne and explains why:

I have just recollected that I have some of the finest old Constantia wine in the house that ever was tasted, so I have brought a glass of it for your sister.

Her late husband, she adds, swore by it for his "colicky gout". In Charles Dickens's unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, published in 1870, the mother of the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle keeps a bottle in her dining room closet and gives him "a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit" whenever she decides he needs support. Decanter and Wines of South Africa both add Charles Baudelaire, whose poem Sed non satiata, in Les Fleurs du mal, names "constance" beside opium among the pleasures the speaker's lover surpasses.

It is harder to know what the wine tasted like. Vizetelly, reporting on the Cape wines shown at the Vienna Exhibition, described a red Constantia as bright in colour, a little too sweet and "not particularly spirituous", and noted medals for two Cloete firms. He believed the vines were red and white Muscat of the Frontignan kind, while the research of Boela Gerber, quoted by Wines of South Africa, suggests Muscat, Pontac and possibly Chenin Blanc. Brook writes that most people who have tasted surviving nineteenth-century bottles believe the wine was fortified.

Tariffs, phylloxera and a long decline

The Cape's wine trade with Britain depended on a tariff advantage. Vizetelly explained that colonial wine had entered England at half the duty charged on foreign wine, and that after duties were equalised by alcoholic strength in 1860, Cape imports fell from 785,926 gallons a year to about an eighth of that figure. He blamed winemaking that had grown careless under protection, much of it ordinary wine shipped to be blended. By 1885 Groot Constantia was insolvent, and on 1 October that year the Cape Government bought it for £5,275, planning to run it as a model and experimental farm.

The vine pest phylloxera was identified at the Cape in a vineyard in Mowbray in early 1886, according to the wine writer Tim James in Winemag. It took twelve years to reach Constantia, less than 10 kilometres away, where a report by J. P. de Waal dated its arrival to 26 November 1898, and De Waal described land at Groot Constantia being prepared for American vines. In Brook's account, the outbreak ended production of the famous sweet wine, and the details of how it was made were lost. Boela Gerber, then Groot Constantia's winemaker, told Wines of South Africa that small quantities of sweet Constantia were still made in some decades, including a 1926 bottle kept on the estate, though none in the 1940s and 1950s. Groot Constantia was restored under the architect F. K. Kendall after a fire in 1925, but the wine's old reputation did not return until the 1980s.

Vin de Constance and the 1980s revival

Duggie Jooste bought Klein Constantia in 1980 and restored it with the winemaker Ross Gower, the architect Gawie Fagan and the viticulturist Professor Chris Orffer, who first proposed recreating the old wine. Their Vin de Constance is made from Muscat de Frontignan grapes left to shrivel on the vine, with no botrytis. The first vintage was made in 1986, and Decanter reports that it was never released commercially, because the Joostes did not know how it would turn out; some bottles later sold at the Nederburg Auction. Wines of South Africa credits the wine's arrival with turning the world's attention back to Constantia's sweet wines.

The Jooste family sold the estate in 2011 to Zdenek Bakala and Charles Harman, and the wine is still made, with the 2023 vintage reviewed on its release in August 2026. Groot Constantia, whose homestead was proclaimed a historical monument in 1936 and whose whole estate was declared a national monument in 1984, has been owned since 1993 by the non-profit Groot Constantia Trust, and Iziko Museums runs its manor house as a museum, where an exhibition traces the lives of the enslaved men and women who worked the farm. For more on the Cape's first wine farms, see our guide to the oldest wine estates near Cape Town, and for the grape the Cape bred itself, crossed at Stellenbosch University in 1924, see our Pinotage page.

Timeline, 1679 to 1986

The valley today

Sources

1. South African History Online. "Constantia", updated 20 July 2026.
2. South African History Online. "Simon van der Stel".
3. M. Whiting Spilhaus. "The story of Simon van der Stel", Historia, vol. 15, no. 2, 1970.
4. Groot Constantia. "Groot Constantia's rich history".
5. Iziko Museums of South Africa. "Groot Constantia" and "Van der Stel era, 1685 to 1714", Slavery in South Africa.
6. Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, with the Western Cape Education Department and the District Six Museum. Forced removals: a case study on Constantia, an oral history resource guide for teachers.
7. Henry Vizetelly. The Wines of the World, "Cape of Good Hope" (1875), Wikisource.
8. Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility (1811), Project Gutenberg. Charles Dickens. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Project Gutenberg. Charles Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du mal, Project Gutenberg.
9. Stephen Brook. "Wine Legend: Klein Constantia, Vin de Constance 1986", Decanter, 7 August 2016.
10. Wines of South Africa. "The iconic sweet wines of Constantia".
11. Tim James. "120 years since the pest phylloxera came to Constantia", Winemag, 26 November 2018.
12. Klein Constantia. "Our story". Greg Sherwood MW. "The new release of Klein Constantia's Vin de Constance 2023", 28 August 2026.
13. Janice Matthews. "Roots in the Valley, remembering Constantia's displaced families", Constantiaberg Bulletin, 30 October 2025.
14. South African History Online. "Circle of Kramats, Cape Town". Karen Watkins. "Heritage nod for city's Muslim shrines", Constantiaberg Bulletin, 13 December 2021.
15. Weekend Argus. "Celebrating excellence: the 2026 Wine Harvest Commemorative event at Groot Constantia", 13 February 2026. Constantia Wine Route, member farms, checked September 2026.
16. Pinotage Association. "Heritage".
17. Photo: Michael Rowe, looking back towards Constantia from Constantia Nek (April 2021), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.