Qualla: Klein Constantia

Klein Constantia: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KC1685, CC BY-SA 3.0. In Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's Mrs. Jennings recommends Constantia wine for "its healing powers on a disappointed heart." Charles Baudelaire compared it to opium and the pleasures of the night. Charles Dickens wrote it into his final, unfinished novel. And according to persistent legend, Napoleon requested a glass of it as he lay dying on St. Helena. The wine that inspired this literary devotion comes from a sheltered valley on the Cape Peninsula, where decomposed granite soil and ocean air on both sides have been producing extraordinary grapes since 1685.

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Image: KC1685 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Klein Constantia: The Governor's Vineyard

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bapak Alex, CC BY-SA 4.0. Simon van der Stel, the Dutch East India Company governor of the Cape, was a keen viticulturist who had soil samples collected from across the colony before choosing his vineyard site. He selected a valley facing False Bay, bounded by ocean on two sides, and named it Constantia. ...

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Image: Bapak Alex | CC BY-SA 4.0

Klein Constantia: Pittsburgh Steel Meets Cape Winelands

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Snelling, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1913, Abraham Lochner de Villiers, a wealthy milliner from Paarl, purchased Klein Constantia with his American wife, Clara Hussey, whose grandfather was the first Pittsburgh steel tycoon. Life at the estate took an exuberant turn. "It was like something out of the Great Gatsby...

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Image: Chris Snelling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Klein Constantia: Revival and Renaissance

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AnonymousUnknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0. Clara Hussey de Villiers died in 1955, and the era of splendor ended with her. The estate passed to the family's designated heir, Jan de Villiers, who had studied viticulture at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the following decades, a new generation revived the wines...

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Image: AnonymousUnknown author | CC BY-SA 4.0

Klein Constantia: Sacred Ground

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KC1685, CC BY-SA 3.0. Amid the vineyards stands a kramat -- the grave of Sheik Abdurachman Matebe Shah, a revered Cape Muslim teacher and cleric who is said to have been one of the three people who brought Islam to southern Africa in the seventeenth century. Captured during the Dutch conquest of Sumat...

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Image: KC1685 | CC BY-SA 3.0