South Africa's wine industry combines a Mediterranean-influenced Cape climate with a modern push toward quality since the end of apartheid, and today it's the world's eighth-largest producer. Chenin Blanc, long the country's most-planted grape, and Pinotage, a uniquely South African crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut, are its most distinctive contributions.
Grapes grown here
Sub-regions
Constantia
Constantia, on the slopes outside Cape Town, was the source of one of the 18th and 19th centuries' most celebrated dessert wines, a favorite of European royalty until phylloxera wiped out the vineyards in the 1890s. The historic style, built mainly around sweet Muscat grapes, was revived starting in 1986 and remains South Africa's signature dessert wine today.
Paarl
Paarl is one of South Africa's oldest and largest wine towns, with a Mediterranean climate and fertile soils that have long supported both wine and fruit farming. It was historically home to the KWV cooperative, which shaped the modern South African wine industry, and today it's a popular stop on the Cape's wine-tourism routes.
Stellenbosch
Stellenbosch, at the heart of South Africa's Cape Winelands, is the country's premier fine-wine district, its Mediterranean climate and mountain-slope soils considered especially well suited to red wine. It has built its reputation above all on Cabernet Sauvignon.
Swartland
The Swartland, a historically wheat-farming area northwest of Cape Town, has in the last couple of decades become one of South Africa's most fashionable wine regions, prized by producers for old, dry-farmed bush vines that need little irrigation.