Wine and Injustice: A History of Exploitation and Inequality in Wine Production

Wine is one of civilisation’s great pleasures — and for most of its history it has been made by people who were owned, coerced or exploited. That is not a footnote to wine’s story. It is part of the story.

Grape-growing is intensely labour-hungry: someone has to prune, pick and press, often in punishing heat, for wages that rarely matched the value of the bottle. Across three thousand years, that labour has repeatedly been supplied by the least free people in a society — slaves, the colonised, and the migrant poor. This is an honest history of the injustice bound up in wine.

The ancient vineyard ran on slaves

In classical Greece and Rome, wine was a mass commodity, and much of the labour behind it — especially on the large Roman estates — was enslaved. As Rome’s wine trade industrialised, the great latifundia worked vineyards with gangs of enslaved people, though free smallholders, tenant farmers and hired seasonal labourers also tended vines — more so in Greece, where small citizen farms were the norm. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder, in his farming manual De agri cultura (c. 160 BCE), discusses the slaves who tended the vines in the same practical breath as tools and livestock, even advising owners to sell off the old and sick.¹² The elegance of the Roman symposium rested on people who had no share in it.

Empire planted vineyards on forced labour

When European powers carried the vine around the world, they carried this pattern with them. Colonial wine industries were built, overwhelmingly, on unfree labour.

At the Cape of Good Hope, wine farming was a staple of the colonial economy under both the Dutch (from the 1650s) and the British — and it rested on slavery. Enslaved men, women and children brought from across Africa, Madagascar, India and the Indonesian archipelago worked the vineyards of the Cape; the celebrated estate of Groot Constantia, founded in 1685, was developed and maintained by hundreds of enslaved labourers.³⁴ Similar coercion planted the vine elsewhere in the colonial world — in the Americas, mission and estate vineyards drew on indigenous forced labour. The specifically colonial chapter is told in our article on African wines under British and French colonialism.⁴ (See also: slavery and the history of wine.)

The dop system: wine as a wage and a weapon

Nowhere is wine’s entanglement with injustice starker than the Cape’s dop system. Farmers paid workers — enslaved people, and later free labourers — partly in daily rations of cheap wine, dispensed at intervals through the working day. Introduced under Dutch colonial rule, it was a deliberate mechanism of control: it kept a workforce dependent, cheap, and often addicted.⁵⁶

Its legacy is measured in human damage. Though the dop system was outlawed, generations of enforced drinking left South Africa’s Western Cape farm communities with some of the highest rates of Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder in the world — a direct, ongoing consequence of paying people in alcohol.⁶⁷ The full account is in our article on the dop system and slavery in Cape vineyards.

The modern vineyard’s hidden workforce

Exploitation did not end with slavery or with the empires. Today the world’s vineyards still lean heavily on the labour of the poor and the precarious. In California, the industry has long depended on migrant and frequently undocumented workers — a history that reaches back to coerced Native American labour in the 19th century and continues in the low pay, insecurity and heat exposure of modern farm work.⁸⁹ In post-apartheid South Africa, farm labourers still contend with poverty and poor conditions on some wine estates.⁶

The point is not that everyone in wine is complicit; it is that the comfort of the finished product has consistently depended on people with little power. Recognising that is the first step in the reckoning the industry has slowly begun — through fair-labour certification, ethical-trade schemes, and a more honest telling of where wine’s wealth came from.

Why an honest history matters

None of this diminishes wine’s cultural achievement — but a full appreciation of it has to include the people history usually leaves out of the picture. The enslaved Roman vinedresser, the Cape labourer paid in the very drink that harmed him, the migrant picker in a modern vineyard: they made the wine too. Telling their story is not an attack on wine. It is simply the rest of the truth.

Read more

• The dop system and slavery in Cape vineyards
• African wines under British and French colonialism
• More on wine and colonialism
• The history of wine: a complete timeline

References

1. Cato the Elder, De agri cultura (c. 160 BCE), on vineyard slaves (LacusCurtius / Univ. of Chicago). ↩
2. HistoriaRomana, “Grapes, Labor, and Wealth: Roman Vineyards and Slavery in the 1st Century AD.” ↩
3. openDemocracy, “Bitter grapes? Slavery, labour and memory in the Cape winelands.” ↩
4. Groot Constantia — founding (1685) and enslaved labour at the Cape (corroborated). ↩
5. Scully, “Slaves, Workers, and Wine: The ‘Dop System’ in the History of the Cape Wine Industry, 1658–1894,” Journal of Southern African Studies 42(5), 2016. ↩
6. London, “The ‘dop’ system, alcohol abuse and social control amongst farm workers in South Africa” and related public-health literature. ↩
7. South African FASD prevalence studies (among the highest recorded worldwide), UCT / PMC. ↩
8. The Daily Beast, “California’s Wine Industry Was Built on Slave Labor.” ↩
9. Forbes, “Modern-Day ‘Slavery’ in the Wine Industry, and What’s Being Done to Address It.” ↩

Want to read more? Try these books

Ancient Wine Patrick E. McGovern

The Story of Wine Hugh Johnson

The Oxford Companion to Wine Jancis Robinson (ed.)

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