8 Cape Wine Estates Older Than the United States

Three years before Simon van der Stel took the land that became Groot Constantia, a German widow named Catharina Ras walked into his office and asked for a plot at the foot of Ou Kaapse Weg. By then Ras had buried five husbands, at least three of them in murky circumstances, and the estate's own marketing happily calls her "one of the Cape's most daring, controversial settlers." In 1682 Van der Stel let her rent about 25 morgen of land (a morgen is an old Dutch land measure, roughly 0.85 hectares). In 1688 that rental became full ownership. So Steenberg is the oldest wine farm in South Africa to hold its land outright, three years older than its far more famous neighbour up the hill.

Today Steenberg is known for two grapes: a really good Sauvignon Blanc (try the Black Swan or the Magna Carta blend) and an unusual one called Nebbiolo, a tricky Italian red grape that only a handful of South African farms even attempt. The farm has a sleek modern tasting room, a good bistro, and the well-rated Catharina's Restaurant. There is also a hotel on the grounds if you want to stay the night.

On 13 July 1685, Simon van der Stel was given 891 morgen (763 hectares) of land behind Table Mountain. He was the governor of the Cape for the VOC, the Dutch East India Company that ran the early colony, which made him the second most powerful man at the Cape. He called the place Constantia. Nobody knows quite why: maybe after a daughter of his patron Rijkloff van Goens, maybe after the Latin word constantia (steadfastness), maybe after a VOC ship of the same name. He built a grand house, planted vines, and within ten years was making a wine that, once Hendrik Cloete bought the farm in 1778, became the most famous sweet wine in the world.

The list of people who drank its sweet wine, Grand Constance, is extraordinary. Napoleon had thirty bottles a month sent to him on St Helena, from the day he arrived in exile in 1815 until he died in 1821. Frederick the Great of Prussia bought it at auction. Louis Philippe, the King of France, was a regular. King George V drank it, and so did Otto von Bismarck. Writers loved it too: Jane Austen has a character recommend it as a cure for heartbreak in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Charles Dickens pours it for a vicar in his last novel, and Charles Baudelaire compares it to his lover's lips in his poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal.

A fire in 1925 gutted the main house so badly that the architect who rebuilt it, Franklin Kendall, said he could hardly imagine a more complete burn-out. The house you see today is his 1926 rebuild. The farm's famous slave bell, cast in 1716 and one of the oldest bells at the Cape, was stolen on 2 September 2024 and has never been found.

When Simon van der Stel died in 1712, his Constantia land was split three ways. The smallest piece kept the best vineyards and took the name "Klein" Constantia, which simply means "little" Constantia. Its vines grow on crumbly granite soil, 70 to 343 metres up the slope, cooled by sea breezes off False Bay. Today its 146 hectares make one of the most admired sweet wines in the world: Vin de Constance.

Vin de Constance is the modern remake of the old Constantia sweet wine Napoleon drank. It was brought back in 1986 by winemaker Ross Gower, with help from a Stellenbosch University grape scientist, Professor Chris Orffer, and the Jooste family, who had bought the farm in 1980. It is made from a small-berried Muscat grape, and about 10% of the crop is left to dry into raisins on the vine before picking, which concentrates the sweetness. At auction it can fetch R44,555 for a single 500ml bottle (1986 vintage, sold by Strauss & Co in June 2025), which makes it one of the priciest South African wines you can buy second-hand.

The farm also faces its past. As you walk into the tasting room there is a display on the wall telling the stories of the enslaved people who worked these vineyards, something only a few Cape farms have chosen to do. There is also a kramat on the land, a small Muslim shrine marking the grave of one of the holy men the Dutch exiled to the Cape; it is one of three in the area.

This is the third slice of Van der Stel's original Constantia land. It was split off from Klein Constantia in 1796 and given the wonderful Dutch name Buitenverwachting, which means "beyond expectation", by its owner at the time, Cornelis Brink. It is the farm locals quietly point you towards: less famous than Groot Constantia, half the price of Klein Constantia, and the highest-rated estate in this whole guide (4.6 stars on Google from 422 reviews).

You taste in the original 250-year-old cellar, white-walled and thatch-roofed. The wine to try is the Buiten Blanc, an easy-drinking white that blends Sauvignon Blanc with Sémillon and has been on Cape Town wine lists for decades. Their version of the old Constantia sweet wine is called 1769, after the year Hendrik Cloete perfected the original recipe. The restaurant has been on the city's "best of" lists for more than twenty years.

Boschendal sits on the Helshoogte Pass between Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. The land was granted in 1685 to Jean le Long, one of the Huguenots, French Protestants who fled their country to escape religious persecution. When the Huguenots arrived in 1688 they changed Cape wine for good, bringing the grape know-how and tastes of France's Loire and Rhône valleys. Boschendal, "wood and dale" in Dutch, is one of the best-preserved farms from that Huguenot era.

The main house, built in 1812, is one of the finest examples of Cape Dutch architecture in the country: H-shaped, brilliant white against the dark vines, with the curly gable trim known locally as broekie-lace. Boschendal is now a big lifestyle estate. It has the Werf Restaurant (a destination in itself), a casual deli, the popular Friday Night Market in summer (October to April), and a small luxury hotel. A 2024 to 2025 expansion added picnic lawns and a farm shop.

A long avenue of palm trees leads to one of the most photographed old homesteads in South Africa, on the floor of the Eerste River valley, 30 km east of Cape Town and a kilometre off the N2 motorway. Meerlust means "love of the sea", a nod to the False Bay views from the upstairs windows. A German settler, Henning Hüsing, founded it in 1693, and the same family, the Myburghs, have owned it since 1756. That is eight generations, which makes it one of the longest family-held wine farms anywhere in the world.

Meerlust is really a one-wine farm. Rubicon, first released in 1980 by Hannes Myburgh and his winemaker Giorgio Dalla Cia, is a Bordeaux-style blend, meaning it mixes the grapes used in red Bordeaux: mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, sometimes a little Petit Verdot. It more or less created the idea of serious South African red wine, and it has been made nearly every year since 1980. You will find it near the top of almost any good South African wine list. The 2018 Rubicon, scored 95 out of 100 by the critic Tim Atkin, is the one to look for.

On 1 February 1700, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, Simon's son, took over as Cape governor and promptly granted himself 30,000 hectares at the foot of the Hottentots-Holland mountains, east of Cape Town. He named it Vergelegen, "situated far away", because that is how remote it felt from the colony. In just six years he built a house, planted half a million vines, set up cattle stations, and dug dams and canals, building a private fortune that did not go unnoticed by his bosses at the company in Amsterdam. In 1706 they sacked him for corruption, sent him home in disgrace, and broke up and sold the estate.

Vergelegen has the highest Google rating of any farm here (4.7 stars from 1,861 reviews), and it deserves it. The five camphor trees Willem Adriaan planted in 1700 are still standing, protected as national monuments since 1942, and are thought to be among the oldest planted foreign trees in South Africa. The walled garden was built tall on purpose, to keep lions out, which was a genuine worry in the 1700s. Since 1987 the farm has belonged to the big mining company Anglo American, which has poured a lot of money into the gardens, restaurants and cellars.

Today there are four places to eat, from the casual Stables Bistro to the smart Camphors restaurant, plus a lovely picnic basket served at long shared tables on the lawn under the camphor trees. The cellar turns out award-winning reds year after year (ask for the flagship Vergelegen V or the GVB White), and the gardens, with their eight-sided walls, sundial and old specimen trees, are some of the most visited in the Cape.

This is the fourth and last piece of Van der Stel's 1685 Constantia grant. Its name means "Constantia view", and it sits lower down than its three sister farms, looking out across the Constantia Valley to False Bay. While the other three kept making wine without a break, Constantia Uitsig spent much of the 1800s and 1900s as grazing land, and only went back to serious winemaking in the 1980s under owner David McCay. The current cellar, a striking glass-and-steel building where you can watch the barrels through the walls, was built in the 2010s.

We put Constantia Uitsig last with an asterisk: the land is older than 1776, but the winemaking has not run unbroken. We include it anyway because it is part of the original Constantia grant, grows on the same soils as its three older siblings, and because the jump from its modern glass cellar to Groot Constantia's 1791 stone one neatly shows how far Cape wine has come in 340 years. The wines to try are the Sauvignon Blanc and the Chardonnay, and the La Colombe restaurant here is currently ranked in Tripadvisor's top 20 restaurants in the world.