Although common knowledge has it that the Huguenots initiated wine-growing in the Cape, the truth is that a number of Dutch settlers were already making some very quaffable wines by the time they arrived. Simon van der Stel’s Vin de Constance, from Klein Constantia, for example, was a world leader in the 1680s. By 1859 more than four million litres of wine had been exported to Britain from the Cape before the wine industry all but collapsed in 1866 following an outbreak of Phylloxera. The current wine harvest is estimated at 780 million litres per year, making South Africa the world’s eighth largest wine-producing country, just ahead of Australia and behind – with the largest first – Italy, France, China, USA, Spain, Argentina and Chile.