February 2

February 2, 1659: On this day in 1659 the first wine ever produced in South Africa was made by Jan Van Riebeeck, the founder and governor of the Dutch Cape Town Colony, from French Muscadel. The Dutch had only begun colonising the region around the southern tip of Africa a few years earlier, when the Dutch East India Company created its first settlement here in 1652. Van Riebeeck, a prominent navigator and official working for the East India Company, was appointed as the first Commander of the Cape Colony. His interest in viticulture ensured that wine production was quickly introduced to the region by the Dutch. However, it would not really take off until the eighteenth century, driven in part by the arrival of several hundred Protestant French viticulturists to the region in the late 1680s, fleeing religious persecution in Catholic France. In due course, the South Africa region would become one of the world’s most acclaimed regions for the production of sweet wines and in the twentieth century became a colossus of New World wine. For more information, see this article on Wines of South Africa.

Header image: Martinvl — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).