Groot Constantia Trail #5: The ‘Forgotten’ Years (Part 1)
This is the 5th cache of an 11-cache trail which will take you around this beautiful historic vineyard passing by most of its key features along the way.
The cache, a camo-taped push-topped food pot, is hidden at the top of a steep wooded slope above a valley in which the Hoop op Constantia homestead is located and can be glimpsed through the trees.
When it comes to the history of Constantia, some stories are very well known – such as Napoleon drinking ‘vin de Constance’ while in exile on St Helena, Jane Austen writing about the wine’s healing powers on a disappointed heart, and the flamboyant Hendrik Cloete, who purchased the property in late 1778 and built the magnificently gabled homestead just over a decade later.
But apart from the obligatory mention of Olof Bergh’s widow, Anna de Koningh, who was famously very beautiful and even more famously born into slavery (but not famously a Constantia winegrower), most guides and history books gloss over the seven decades between Simon van der Stel’s death in 1712 and Hendrik Cloete’s purchase of Groot Constantia with its ‘ruined’ buildings and ‘exhausted’ vineyards (as described in his letter of 15 January 1779). So, it would seem that nothing much happened during this period.
However, Prussian emperor Frederick the Great had 409 bottles of Capp Constancia in the wine cellar of his Potsdam castle, Schloss Sanssouci, in October 1777, and even American founding father George Washington was gifted ‘a small Box Containing one dozen Bottles of Constantia Wine’ in May 1778.
Even earlier in 1744, the cellar at Frederiksdal Castle in Denmark (then owned by Johann Sigismund Schulin, chief secretary of the German Chancellery) was stocked with several bottles of Constanze, as well as some more generic Capvin and Hvid (white) Capvin.
Also, London’s Daily Advertiser already had an advertisement for ‘genuine red and white Constantia Cape Wine’ in its 11 June 1743 issue, describing the wine as ‘very bright, and of fine Flavour’ (when much of the fake Constantia already cropping up in Europe was not).
These ‘missing decades’ of SA should be celebrated, including the story of one of Constantia’s most fascinating individuals: Johannes Colijn of Hoop op Constantia - the 1716 sub-division of Constantia originally known as ‘Klein Constantia’, and not the current Klein Constantia.
Now a private residence at GC, the Hoop op Constantia homestead (which in its heyday boasted three gables) was home to several generations of Colijns.
The Hoop homestead and old cellar can still be found tucked in a shady hollow a short stroll down the hill from the Groot Constantia homestead [and can be seen through the trees from the location of GCT #5]. Historically the two farms were separated only by a hedge - in fact Hoop became part of GC in the mid-1970s.
In 1726, Johannes Colijn provided the ‘red and white Constantia’ that Cape governor Jan de la Fontaine told his VOC superiors he’d be shipping with the next consignment. On 22 August 1727 it was formally agreed that Colijn would now annually supply the VOC with 10-12 leaguers of red Constantia wine at 80 rixdollars each (one leaguer being 563L) and 20 leaguers of white Constantia wine at 50 rixdollars each.
He honoured these until 1733, when a poor harvest meant he could only offer 16 leaguers in total. But the next year when his (absent) neighbour, Anna de Koningh, died, he promptly secured a loan (including some money of his own) for his sister Johanna’s husband, Carl Georg Wieser, to purchase Groot Constantia . . . (continues with Part 2)
