SLAVE TO THE GRAPE

S teve McQueen’s film about Solomon Northup, the free Negro who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years, will surely walk away with a few Oscars tonight. What a story.

It’s got me thinking about some of the Cape’s own freed slaves, or “Free Blacks”, who had (mostly) earned their manumission by learning to speak fluent Dutch, being baptised, and finding/paying for a slave to replace them. What remarkable individuals they must have been.

Take Maria Evert, who was born into slavery in around 1663. When she died during the 1713 smallpox epidemic, she left a fortune in cash, possessions and property — including the land we know today as Camps Bay. And it was her son, Johannes Colijn, who first made sweet Constantia wine internationally famous — negotiating annual shipments to Europe from as early as 1727.

Another successful wine farmer was Willem Stolts, freed in 1724 at the age of 32 when his owner died, bequeathing him and two other slaves eight oxen and two fishing nets from which to make a living. He went on to own the farms Wolwedans and Hoornbosch south of Malmesbury, not to mention 11 slaves of his own.

Anthony of Angola, meanwhile, employed white men on the Jonkershoek farm he was granted in 1683, namely Englishman Willem Teerling and Germans Hans Jes and Christian Marenz. Between 1688 and 1692, he increased his vineyards from 400 to 4 000 vines, but sadly he died before 1696 when the farm “Angola” was incorporated into what became Lanzerac, now best known for bottling the world’s first pinotage in 1959.

Big, bold and velvety with ripe plum flavours, and highly recommended with bobotie and other Cape Malay curries dating from a truly fascinating era, the Lanzerac Pionier Pinotage 2010 (R325) seems an appropriate wine with which to toast these early unsung heroes.