The oldest wine estates near Cape Town, and who built them

Simon van der Stel, who arrived as commander of the Cape in 1679 and was later made governor, was granted 891 morgen (about 763 hectares) behind Table Mountain on 13 July 1685, according to Groot Constantia's own history and SA History Online. He called the farm Constantia, and the estate offers three possible reasons for the name: a daughter of the VOC official Rijckloff van Goens, a Company ship called Constantia, or the Latin word for constancy.

The wine that made the valley famous was a sweet one. Hendrik Cloete bought Groot Constantia in December 1778. The cellar pediment in the photograph above, dated 1791, is attributed to the sculptor Anton Anreith, and the estate credits the architect Louis Michel Thibault and Anreith with the later work on the manor house. Iziko records that the Cloetes supplied Constantia wine to Napoleon in exile on St Helena, and that Frederick the Great of Prussia and King Louis Philippe of France ordered it.

Gibson argues that the Cloetes were only one of two celebrated producers. The Colijn family at Hoop op Constantia, on the Klein Constantia side, was making the same wine and negotiating shipments with the VOC in the 1720s, and a visitor in 1829 wrote that there was little difference between the wines of the two estates. Both families were making it until the middle of the nineteenth century, and Groot Constantia's history records powdery mildew arriving in 1859, followed by phylloxera. The colonial government bought Groot Constantia on 1 October 1885 for £5,275. A fire gutted the manor house just before Christmas 1925, and the house that visitors see today is Franklin Kendall's restoration. Since 1993 the estate has belonged to the Groot Constantia Trust, and Iziko runs the manor house as a museum.

Klein Constantia's revival came much later, after Duggie Jooste bought the farm in 1980, and the estate made the first modern vintage of its sweet Vin de Constance in 1986. It is made from Muscat de Frontignan grapes left to raisin on the vine, and the 2023 vintage was released in August 2026.

Buitenverwachting's own history says it was first sold in 1773 as a 200 morgen subdivision to Cornelis Brink, and that Ryk Arnoldus Cloete planted 90,000 vines there in 1825.

Steenberg lies at the southern end of the valley, below the Ou Kaapse Weg. Its founder was Catharina Ras, a widow from Lübeck who, in the estate's telling, asked Van der Stel in 1682 for 25 morgen at the foot of the Steenberg and in 1688 received the right "to cultivate, to plough, to sow and also to possess the farm below the stone mountain". Steenberg describes her as the first recorded female landowner under the VOC at the Cape.

Gibson found a more complicated record in the archives. The 1692 census return states that Ras and her husband Michielsz had lived on and cultivated the land for fifteen years, which would put the first farming in the late 1670s, and by then they were making wine from 8,000 vines and held eight enslaved people. She also suggests that the land may have been registered in Catharina's name as a legal technicality, since married women then had no legal identity apart from their husbands. Steenberg's claim to be the oldest farm in the valley rests on occupation from the late 1670s and on the 1688 mandate, which the estate calls its title deed.

Rustenberg, on the slopes of the Simonsberg, dates itself to 1682 and to Roelof Pasman, a German from Meurs near the Rhine. The estate says that in 1810 Jacob Eksteen split the land into two farms, Rustenberg and Schoongezicht, and that in 1892 John X Merriman, later the last prime minister of the Cape Colony, bought Schoongezicht while his brother-in-law John Barry bought Rustenberg. Wine has been made on the farms without a break since that year, and Peter Barlow bought Rustenberg in 1941.

Blaauwklippen, on the road south of the town, also claims 1682, and a feature on wine.co.za in June 2026 presented it as established in that year. Gibson finds no vines there in 1682 and 1,000 by 1688.

Muratie, in the Knorhoek valley north of Stellenbosch, has a founding story that the estate tells in detail. The estate says the German soldier Laurens Campher farmed there from 1685 and was granted the farm, then called De Driesprong, in February 1699. Campher had formed a relationship with Ansela van de Caab, a woman who spent much of her early life held captive in the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town, and he walked or travelled by ox wagon to visit her. The estate's timeline gives the date of her emancipation as 28 June 1695 in its text and as 1699 in a heading, and says that when she came to live on the farm the couple already had three children. Martin Melck bought Muratie in 1763, and his descendants have owned it again since 1987.

Spier, on the Eerste River, has a title deed signed by Van der Stel in 1692 for Arnoud Jansz, and the estate describes its cellar as the oldest dated wine cellar in South Africa.

Meerlust, lower down the Eerste River towards False Bay, was granted to Henning Hüsing in 1693, and he named it for the pleasure of the sea. The Myburgh family has owned it since 1756 by the estate's reckoning. The first commercial vintage of its Bordeaux-style blend, Rubicon, was 1980, and the 2023 vintage was reviewed on its release in January 2026.

Simon van der Stel's son Willem Adriaan succeeded him as governor, and his deed of grant for Vergelegen, "far away", was signed on 1 February 1700 at the foot of the Hottentots-Holland mountains. The Heritage Portal gives the grant as 400 morgen, while the estate's own heritage page describes a much larger landholding. Within six years, the estate says, he had half a million vines, fruit orchards, orange groves and eighteen cattle stations. He was in bitter dispute with Adam Tas and other free burghers, and the directors of the VOC dismissed him in a letter dated 30 October 1706 and ordered him back to the Netherlands. In 1709 the estate was sold as four farms: Vergelegen, Lourensford, Morgenster and Cloetenburg.

Vergelegen is also one of the few Cape farms where the lives of enslaved people have been studied through excavation. A 2020 report in Matie Media, citing the archaeologists Ann Markell, Martin Hall and Carmel Schrire, puts the number of enslaved people Willem Adriaan held there at about 200, and the historian Marianne Gertenbach traces their origins to India, Indonesia and the east coast of Africa. Archaeologists from the University of Cape Town excavated the ruins of the slave lodge, and in October 1990 they found the remains of a woman aged between 50 and 59, buried in a wooden box under its floor. Her diet and teeth pointed to origins in the tropics. SA History Online records that she was given the name Flora and reburied on 6 April 1991, with twenty to thirty farmworkers singing hymns at the graveside. Ann Markell, Martin Hall and Carmel Schrire published the excavation in the journal Historical Archaeology in 1995.

Boschendal lies below the Helshoogte Pass on the road from Stellenbosch to Franschhoek, in the valleys where French Huguenot refugees were settled at the end of the seventeenth century. SA History Online says that Van der Stel granted the land in 1685 to the Huguenot Jean le Long, and that Abraham de Villiers bought it in 1715 and his family kept it for 164 years. The architects Gwen and Gawie Fagan, who restored the farm, wrote in 1979 that Le Long farmed there from 1685 but that the Company measured the land only in 1713, so here too the farming and the title came at different times.

The manor house was built by Paul de Villiers on the foundations of his father's house, and its front gable carries the date 1812 with the couple's initials. Paul took transfer of the farm in June 1807, and the Fagans record that his father, Jan de Villiers, had held thirty-one enslaved people there. Cecil John Rhodes bought Boschendal in 1897 for his Rhodes Fruit Farms.