South Africa has been a significant producer of grape brandy, more or less in the European style, since it was settled by Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century, although the production and use of fermented alcoholic drinks was widespread in South African tribal societies long before the Dutch arrived. The Xhosa, for example, made (and continue to make) traditional grain-based beers, which are central to their social and spiritual life. Europeans introduced viticulture in the seventeenth century, and wine making expanded in the nineteenth century as European vineyards were being ravaged by the oidium, peronospera, and phylloxera epidemics. South African wines helped replenish the dwindling availability of wine in Europe, though those diseases and pests eventually devastated South African vineyards too.
The country’s alcohol industry was continuously warped by its colonial station, with favorable export status (always to the United Kingdom) ending abruptly in 1861. Its importance to the Crown lurched about as diamonds (1867) and gold (1884) were discovered, commensurate with strife and wars (the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the Boer Wars of 1880 and 1889). Alcohol became not only an economic weapon but a tool for social control as well. The dop, the nineteenth-century strategy of labor control by which workers were paid in tots (whether wine, beer, or spirits), created generations of impoverished alcoholics. See dop. Even today, estimates of continuing worker exploitation through the dop range between 2 percent and 20 percent in the agricultural sector, and fetal alcohol syndrome is estimated to affect 5 percent of births.
Well into the twentieth century, the alcohol industry struggled haphazardly to respond to the dictates of empire. By 1895, 1.5 million gallons of brandy were being produced, equal to 25 percent of the volume of wine production, due as much to a plummeting export market as to some inherent need for more spirit.
The Ko-operatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging van Zuid-Afrika (KWV) was created in 1918 amid a collapsing, dire market. With broad control over the production, sale, and export of wine and spirits, this government-owned virtual monopoly ruled the industry until the end of apartheid. Though illegal, home brew and distillate became a hidden feature of the landscape throughout this vast country. From the 1930s, brewers were making skomfani skokiaan, from sugar, yeast, and water. Others made isiqataviku (“kill-quick”), babaton, and chechisa (“hurry-up”) or isishimeyane, made from sugar cane, yeast, cooked potatoes, and brandy. Mampoer or witblits (“white lightning”) was a farm product, distilled from peaches and carrying a reputation for potency. Under apartheid, only whites were allowed to make or drink alcoholic drinks; speak-easies and shebeen culture in the black townships remain a harmful legacy to this day. While domestic sales were denied to the KWV by its charter until recently, it historically supplied spirit to merchants and estates, each prohibited from distilling at all or at least constrained from maturing and marketing spirit.
naartjes tangerines that has been a South African specialty since at least the late nineteenth century.Since 1981 South African brandy must contain a minimum 30 percent pot-still brandy (the remainder is neutral wine spirit); 1990 saw the minimum alcohol level reduced from 43 percent to 38 percent ABV. A new category was launched as well: pot-still brandy, with a minimum of 90 percent pot-still spirit.
The old problems remain: Euromonitor estimates that nearly one-quarter of all spirits consumed in South Africa are illegal home brews, which are unregulated and sometimes lethal. With brandy sales little more than half what they were a few decades ago, whisky consumption in South Africa has rapidly increased (sixth highest in the world). Domestic whisky production is also on the rise, led primarily by the giant Distell Corporation. The country’s best-known liqueur is Amarula, the world’s no. 2 cream liqueur.
See also Central and East Africa.
Gossage, J. Phillip. Alcohol Use, Working Conditions, Job Benefits, and the Legacy of; the “Dop” System among Farm Workers in the Western Cape Province, South Africa: Hope Despite High Levels of Risky Drinking. Bethesda, MD: US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, 2014.
Department of Community Health. The ‘Dop’ System, Alcohol Abuse and Social Control amongst Farm Workers in South Africa: A Public Health Challenge. Rondebosch, South Africa: University of Cape Town Medical School, 1999.
By: Doug Frost