Ancient bedrock, modern history

Agulhas is ancient. Along with the wind, the other major player in this region’s story is the primordial soils, said to date back 300million years. The resulting diversity includes layers of laterite, sandstone and broken shale, with pockets of quartz and limestone.

A cross-hatching done in ochre on a stone fragment dating from more than 70,000 years ago – believed to be the earliest-known drawing by a human – was found in Blombos Cave, along the coast from David Trafford’s Sijnn estate.

In more recent history, Moravian missionaries in Elim made the area’s first wines about 150 years ago for their Holy Communion. Elim is defined by its fishermen’s cottages, most of which date back to the 19th century, made of mud-brick and plastered with lime and seashell.

It’s also the site of one of the few surviving South African mission stations, founded in 1824. However, it was in the 1990s that pioneering farmers started planting vines alongside their cereal crops. With the collapse of the Nationalist government in 1994, the suffocating rules governing viticulture were relaxed. Pioneering producers spread out to outlying areas such as Elgin, Hemel-en-Aarde and Elim.

Credited for establishing the latter are winemaker Charles Hopkins (now with De Grendel), viticulturist Johan Wiese, accountant Pieter Ferreira and Hein Koegelenberg (of La Motte). The brand they started was Land’s End, now owned by Du Toitskloof Cellar. Other farmers who turned to viticulture soon followed: Johan de Kock (Zoetendal), Francis Pratt (The Berrio) and Dirk Human (Black Oystercatcher).

And, in 2019, the Agulhas Wine Triangle was established to promote this outlier region as a whole.