Slavery and the History of Wine

Some of the most celebrated wines in history were made possible by slavery. It is not a comfortable fact, and for a long time it went politely unmentioned in the romantic story wine likes to tell about itself. But from the sugar-and-wine islands of the Atlantic to the vineyards of the Cape and the cellars of the American Founders, enslaved men and women planted, tended, pressed and carried wine that others grew rich selling. To tell the history of wine honestly is to tell this part of it too, plainly and without flinching. For the full story, see the great turning points in wine history.

Wine and the Atlantic economy

From the fifteenth century, European powers built an Atlantic economy that tied together sugar, wine, spirits and the trade in human beings. Wine and brandy were provisions on ships and goods bartered along the African coast, while the plantations that fed the system ran on enslaved labour. Wine did not stand apart from this world — it was woven into it¹.

Madeira: where the plantation began

The pattern was set on a small Atlantic island. When the Portuguese began growing sugar on Madeira around 1452, they created something new and terrible: one of the first territories where large plantations and enslaved labour were combined into a systematic model of colonial exploitation².

At first the work fell to enslaved Guanches from the Canary Islands and captives from North Africa; from around 1475, thousands of enslaved West Africans were shipped in to labour on the sugar. That Madeira model — plantation, cash crop, enslaved workforce — would be carried across the Atlantic to Brazil, the Caribbean and beyond. And Madeira, of course, would go on to become one of the most famous wine islands on earth, its later fame built on the same soil that pioneered plantation slavery³⁴.

The Cape: Constantia built on bondage

Nowhere is the link between fine wine and slavery clearer than at the Cape of Good Hope. When the Dutch East India Company granted the farm of Constantia to Simon van der Stel in 1685, the vineyards were worked by enslaved people — about twenty-two of them by 1688 — and the luscious sweet wine that made Constantia the toast of European courts was, from the beginning, the product of people who were themselves owned as property⁵.

This was no aberration but the foundation of the whole Cape wine industry. Between 1658 and 1807 roughly sixty-three thousand people were brought in bondage to the Cape — from Madagascar, East Africa, South and Southeast Asia — and it was their forced labour that planted, pruned and pressed the wine. The elegant estates of the Cape winelands are monuments to their work as much as to their owners’⁶.

The wines that graced Europe’s finest tables were, at the Cape, the work of the enslaved.— on the history of Cape wine⁶

Paid in wine: the dop system

Cape wine slavery also left a uniquely cruel legacy in the glass itself: the dop, or tot, system. Farmers took to paying their workers — enslaved, and later nominally free — partly in cheap wine, doled out in rations through the working day⁷.

It was a calculated dependency. Cheap to the farmer and profitable in the way it bound workers to the estate, the dop system fostered chronic alcohol dependence among Cape labourers, and it proved horrifyingly durable — entrenched by the eighteenth century, still widespread in the nineteenth, and casting a shadow over the winelands long after slavery itself was abolished⁸.

Wine and slavery in colonial America

In the American colonies, Madeira was the fashionable wine — poured, by tradition, to toast the Declaration of Independence. Yet the refined wine culture of the young republic was entangled with slavery at every turn. Thomas Jefferson, the country’s first great wine enthusiast, pursued his ambition to make Virginia a wine region with the labour of the enslaved, and the wealth that funded his vines, his cellar and his elegant life at Monticello was built on the people he held in bondage⁹.

Their skill, not just their labour, made that world possible. James Hemings, enslaved in Jefferson’s household, was taken to Paris and trained as a chef, returning to run the Monticello kitchen and cook for the American elite before finally negotiating his freedom in 1796. The polish of Jefferson’s table — the wine, the food, the refinement — rested on people whose own freedom was bargained for, or never came at all¹⁰.

Abolition — and what remained

Slavery was central to the Cape for nearly two centuries. The British Slavery Abolition Act, passed in 1833 and taking effect on 1 August 1834, finally ended it across the empire — though a further period of coerced “apprenticeship” kept many in bondage in all but name until 1838¹¹¹².

The estates, however, remained — and so did their habits. Emancipation did not undo the dop system or the deep inequalities of the winelands, and the names of most of the enslaved people who built those vineyards went unrecorded, even as the estates they raised grew ever more famous.

A reckoning

Today some of these estates confront their history directly, telling the stories of the enslaved alongside the history of their wines — and researchers are slowly recovering the names and lives that the old records erased. Acknowledging this past does not diminish the wine. It honours the people whose forced labour helped create it, and it completes a story that was, for far too long, told only from the side of those who profited.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• The dop system in the Cape vineyards
• Mission wine and coerced Native labor
• The Dutch, the Cape and the wine trade

References

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Transatlantic slave trade. www.britannica.com ↩
2. Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (College of Charleston) — Plantations and the Trans-Atlantic Trade. ldhi.library.cofc.edu ↩
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Madeira Islands. www.britannica.com ↩
4. The Portugal News — Slaves, Sugar and Rampant Capitalism: Madeira 1440–1540. www.theportugalnews.com ↩
5. Groot Constantia — Our History. www.grootconstantia.co.za ↩
6. Iziko / Slavery in South Africa — The Van der Stel Era. slavery.iziko.org.za ↩
7. Journal of Southern African Studies — Slaves, Workers, and Wine: The “Dop System” in the Cape Wine Industry, 1658–1894. www.tandfonline.com ↩
8. Journal of Wine Economics (Cambridge) — Slave Labor Productivity and Wine Output, Stellenbosch 1680–1828. www.cambridge.org ↩
9. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello — The Life of James Hemings. www.monticello.org ↩
10. Grape Collective — Thomas Jefferson: America’s Founding Father of Wine. www.grapecollective.com ↩
11. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Cape Colony. www.britannica.com ↩
12. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Slavery Abolition Act. www.britannica.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Sets the Atlantic wine trade in its full historical context.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Honest on wine’s entanglement with empire, labour and slavery.

As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book recommendations are chosen independently.