History of African Wines Under British and French Colonialism

Africa is often treated as a footnote in wine. It should not be: under French rule, Algeria became the largest wine exporter on earth, and under British rule the Cape built an export industry that Britain later destroyed with a stroke of the tariff pen.

The common question — why didn’t the wine-loving British and French leave a wine legacy in Africa? — rests on a false premise. They did. Colonial Africa produced wine on an enormous scale. What happened next was not a failure of enthusiasm but a series of political decisions: tariffs, an insect, a religion the colonisers ignored, and, finally, independence.

French Algeria: the forgotten wine giant

France invaded Algeria in 1830 and, over the following century, turned it into a vineyard. The decisive push came from disaster at home: when phylloxera struck France from 1863 — destroying between a third and 40% of the country’s vineyard area at its worst, between 1875 and 1889 — ruined French growers emigrated across the Mediterranean in their tens of thousands. They planted Algeria to supply the wine France could no longer make. Phylloxera was the spark, but not the only fuel: cold-fermentation technology made hot-climate winemaking commercially viable, the Bank of Algeria was compelled to open agricultural credit, French tariffs from 1892 shut out Spanish and Italian wine in Algeria’s favour — and land was expropriated from Algerians and worked with cheap coerced labour.¹²

The result was staggering, and it came earlier than is usually assumed. Algeria was already the world’s largest wine exporter before the First World War — some 41% of all internationally traded wine in 1909–13, more than double second-placed Spain — and it stayed at the top into the late 1960s. Its peak came in the mid-1930s, when Algeria supplied roughly two-thirds of the world’s wine exports. By 1960 it was exporting more wine than France, Italy and Spain combined.¹² Almost none of it was drunk as Algerian wine: as much as 90% of the export went to France. Much was blended — post-phylloxera French wine ran to only 9–10% alcohol, while Algerian reds reached 13–16% and were far deeper in colour, so they were used to give French wine body, colour and strength (about a fifth of Algerian output was formally classed as blending wine). Much more was simply sold as cheap French table wine. Either way, the colony was indispensable and invisible at the same time.

Then it unravelled — not overnight, but over roughly two decades. Independence in 1962 cut the industry loose from the market it had been built entirely to serve, and cost it the settler and French-army customers who drank much of the rest. France signed a five-year purchase agreement in 1964, then reneged under pressure from its own growers. The decisive blow was regulatory: France banned the blending of French with non-French wine, and the ban was written into European Community law in 1970, closing the whole Community market. A Soviet contract from 1969 briefly revived exports at unprofitable prices. Meanwhile the sector had been nationalised in 1962 and put in the hands of administrators with little winemaking expertise. The uprooting came later still — ordered on a mass scale in 1971. Algeria’s vineyards fell from about 366,000 hectares at independence to roughly 25,000 by 2005: the same area as in 1880.²³ The full story is told in our articles on the Algerian wine industry and the transformation of Algeria’s vineyards.

The British Cape: built by a tariff, broken by a tariff

At the other end of the continent, the story turns on trade policy. Britain took the Cape in 1806 (having already held it once, in 1795–1803), but the transformation came with a specific piece of law: an Act of 1813 admitted Cape wine to Britain at a third of the duty charged on Spanish and Portuguese wine. The response was immediate — Cape vineyard area roughly tripled between 1795 and 1825, and by 1823 wine made up some 72% of the value of everything the Cape exported. That boom was worked, it should be said, by enslaved people; slavery was not abolished at the Cape until 1834.⁴⁵ For a few decades, Cape wine had a protected berth in the world’s richest market — and Constantia, the Cape’s legendary sweet Muscat, had already made its name — commanding high prices at European auctions, sought by European courts, and famous enough to appear in Jane Austen and Dickens. (See also: slavery and the history of wine.)

Then Britain changed its mind — twice. The preference was already cut sharply in 1825, and it was finally abolished around 1861, in the free-trade wave that produced the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1860 and Gladstone’s wine-duty reforms. The mechanism mattered as much as the principle: Gladstone taxed wine by strength, and Cape wine was fortified with spirit to survive the voyage — so it fell into the higher duty bands at exactly the moment light French claret became cheap. Cape wine lost its protection and was penalised for being strong.⁵⁶ Exports collapsed. Phylloxera reached the Cape soon after, and by the early twentieth century chronic overproduction had wrecked prices — the crisis that produced the giant growers’ co-operative KWV in 1918. Statutory powers granted in 1924 let it fix minimum prices and set production limits, and it dominated South African wine until those controls were dismantled in the 1990s.⁷

Why the “missing” wine legacy is a myth

Put together, the record contradicts the idea that Europe failed to plant wine in Africa. Four forces shaped what survived:

• Tariffs. Colonial wine industries lived or died on preferential access to the metropole’s market.
• Phylloxera. It created the Algerian boom by wrecking France — then arrived in Africa itself.
• Religion. Across North Africa, wine was planted in predominantly Muslim societies with no domestic market for it, leaving the industry wholly dependent on export.
• Independence. When colonial rule ended, industries built for the coloniser’s market lost their reason to exist.

And the labour that built them was rarely free or fairly paid — the subject of our article on wine and injustice and, at the Cape specifically, the dop system.

African wine today

The colonial map still shows through. South Africa is a top-ten world producer — eighth in 2024, at 8.8 million hectolitres (OIV) — its industry a direct descendant of the Cape’s. Morocco and Tunisia retain smaller industries from the French period, and Algeria’s is a fraction of its former self. Elsewhere — in Ethiopia, Kenya, Namibia and beyond — newer ventures are growing wine on their own terms rather than an empire’s.

This day in wine history

• 5 July 1962 — Algeria marks its independence (France had formally recognised it on 3 July), beginning the long unwinding of the world’s largest wine-export industry.

Read more

• The forgotten king of wine exporters: the Algerian wine industry
• The transformation of Algeria’s vineyards
• Wine and injustice: exploitation and inequality in wine
• The legacy of phylloxera
• More on wine and colonialism

References

1. Meloni & Swinnen, “The Rise and Fall of the World’s Largest Wine Exporter — and Its Institutional Legacy,” Journal of Wine Economics 9(1), 2014. ↩
2. VinePair, “The Great Boom and the Epic Bust of the Algerian Wine Industry.” ↩
3. Wine Enthusiast, “Once a North African Wine Giant, Algeria Reckons With an Uncertain Future.” ↩
4. British occupation of the Cape (1806) and commercial expansion of Cape viticulture (corroborated). ↩
5. Cape wine and British preferential tariffs, and their removal (corroborated). ↩
6. Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce (1860) and Gladstone’s wine-duty reforms of the early 1860s. ↩
7. KWV (Koöperatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging), founded 1918 in response to Cape overproduction. ↩

Want to read more? Try these books

The Story of Wine Hugh Johnson

The Oxford Companion to Wine Jancis Robinson (ed.)

Ancient Wine Patrick E. McGovern

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