TRAVEL SPECIAL... City of Gins

City of Gins

How gin is a powerful expression of Cape Town, with roots that reach beyond the hipster trends that have now reinvented it

It may seem odd that Cape Town doesn’t have a long gin tradition. The city was, after all, created by the Dutch and developed by the British, much like the spirit. In The Book of Gin, Richard Bartlett traces how knowledge of distillation spread from Arabia to Europe through the medieval ages, with the spirit mostly used for medicinal purposes.

But it was in the 16th century in Leiden in the Netherlands that gin as we now know it was developed. This was a distilled spirit flavoured with juniper (the main flavouring, and source of its name) and other aromatic “botanicals” and meant for drinking. This university town had the scientific knowledge and the Netherlands, at the height of its “Golden Age” of prosperity, supplied the demand.

The thirst for alcohol was huge, but with farmland still being reclaimed from the sea and a cold climate, the grain and grapes to make it were scarce. Gin could be distilled from anything that fermented, didn’t need time and space to age and flavourings were easily available, thanks to the very source of Dutch prosperity: the spice trade of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, the Dutch East India Company).

Bartlett explains how Dutch gin makers like the Bols family, whose brand, one of the oldest in the world, dates from 1575, cultivated close relations with the VOC: “by 1602 they had arranged to supply their spirits to leading members of the Company, and in return they were given preferential access to the VOC spice warehouses.” VOC ships took “genever” or “Hollands”, as it was called, around the world.

The VOC was also why Cape Town existed. To reach their spice trading hub in Batavia (Jakarta), their ships had to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. It was a difficult crossing and the VOC realised the value of establishing a station close to the Cape, for ships to refuel before attempting it, or to recover after doing so. In 1651 the VOC dispatched Jan van Riebeeck to establish the colony.

In his book Ten Cities That Made an Empire, Tristram Hunt emphasises how, unlike other colonial cities, Cape Town was not created to exploit its interior, but purely to cater to passing ships. The farms planted by the Dutch — like the Company Gardens that are now next to South Africa’s parliament — grew produce to provision the ships, including British, French and American ones, “all of whom were charged higher rates for their victuals by the VOC in order to subsidise the refuelling of the Dutch East Indiamen (ships),” writes Hunt.

Sailors, of course, also required alcohol, both to drink when they landed, and then to load on board, for the next long stage of their journey. Cape Town was awash in liquor, so it is hardly surprising that it acquired the title of “Tavern of the Seas”. Netherlands genever would have been on offer, but there was a more local alternative.

Grapes grew well in the Cape’s Mediterranean climate and van Riebeeck got the ships that came to Cape Town to get him varieties from far and wide. The wine they produced was not, initially at least, particularly good, but it didn’t need to be. Most of it was meant to be distilled into brandy or spiked with this spirit to make port-style fortified wines that would last well on long voyages and give sailors the strong drink they wanted.

In time, Cape wines would improve hugely, with one style in particular, a sweet wine named Constantia, becoming world famous (the style has sadly vanished). It proved particularly popular with the British — in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, a glass of fine old Constantia is recommended for “its healing powers on a disappointed heart”. But the reasons why the British abruptly took over the Cape colony in 1795 were simply practical, and involved India.

By the late 18th century, the loss of their American colonies had focused the British on India. And just as the VOC had realised earlier, the British saw the strategic importance of Cape Town. If rivals like the French gained control, they could make British access to India much harder, perhaps even impossible. Hunt describes how Henry Dundas, the British statesman who was a driving force behind an expanded British presence in India, pushed for Cape Town, “the Frontier fortress of India”, to be taken over by the British. It was even proposed that the East India Company take control, which would have made Cape Town a distant outpost of India!

Rather sadly, perhaps, the Company declined to get involved, and the British finally stepped in and took over the Cape. In typically legalistic style, they asserted that they were simply re-establishing control, since in 1620, 30 years before van Riebeeck came, two British officers had landed on the Cape and claimed it for Great Britain, but had showed little interest in the place — until now.

The Dutch were hardly happy about this, but were assured that their trading and property privileges would be respected. The British and Dutch were, in general, uneasy allies, competing over trade, but also bound together by events like the takeover of the British throne by the Dutch prince William of Orange in 1689, where he ruled as co-monarch with his British wife Mary.

Gin was another bond. William’s ascension in Britain helped popularise the drink, which the British soon started manufacturing on a far larger scale than the Dutch. Gin became the drink of the rapidly growing British cities and of its colonies. In a link back to its medical origins, the British mixed it with soda water infused with quinine to prevent malaria, creating gin and tonic, the iconic drink of their Indian empire.

But in the Cape, brandy continued to rule, even till now. During a recent wine tour of the Stellenbosch area, our guide, a genial gentleman in his sixties who had retired after a career in the South African liquor industry, explained that, “during apartheid, for understandable reasons, we faced sanctions on exporting our wines, so a lot of it was just made into brandy”. Spirits are easier to store and have higher profit margins.

Post-apartheid the wine industry has not been able to shake off its image of being a largely white-run business, and this has had consequences. “We just don’t get the government support that winegrowers in countries like Chile and Argentina do,” sighs the guide. South African wineries produce excellent and wellpriced wines, but few can handle the costs attached to exporting. Only a few wines by big companies like the (very mediocre) Two Oceans are widely available outside the country, leaving a large volume that still goes into making brandy.

Spirit of Cape

But in Cape Town today, gin is suddenly in fashion. The trendiest drinking spots in the city now all have boutique gins, some actually made in the city or in other parts of the Western Cape. This includes names like Inverroche, Musgrave, Hope on Hopkins, Wilderer, Cape Town Gin Co, Woodstock Gin, New Harbour, Cruxland and Jorgenson’s. (There’s even a non-alcoholic gin called Duchess, which offers the flavours of juniper and other botanicals, without the alcohol kick!) Distilleries don’t actually need a lot of space especially if, as with gin, the spirits aren’t subsequently barrel-aged, and the city now offers the chance to see the beautiful copper stills where the process happens. There’s also a range of gin bars, including one created in the New York Prohibition era style of a hidden ‘speakeasy’ bar. This is behind a chocolate shop on Wale Street, just a few blocks from the Taj Cape Town hotel; after the shop closes for the night, you can still enter and go behind to find a buzzy gin bar that’s open very late.

All this is, of course, part of the hipster reinvention of gin across the world, and Cape Town is a very hipster-friendly city. “It’s the sort of city where people are always sitting in cafes working on projects!” a friend once told me with some disdain, implicating that selfconsciously ironic, yet still self-important hipster style.

There’s also a natural fit between the way hipsters create their own bubbles, essentially uninterested in wider issues, and Cape Town’s tendency to see itself as cut off from the rest of South Africa and its problems. This is a city that, centuries after its founding, still looks to the sea and worlds beyond, rather than the land behind it. It is truly startling how, almost 25 years since the end of apartheid, the city still seems so white — unless you happen to drive through the black townships outside.

Yet there is one way in which these new Cape Town gins link to the lands that stretch above and beyond the city by the sea. For the botanicals that flavour these gins, adding the layers of complexity and individuality above the basic juniper, ginmakers have been using the typical plants of the South African countryside, particularly the highly aromatic shrubs collectively known as fynbos which make up the unique biosphere of the Cape.

This might seem like an affectation, easily drowned in a cocktail, but it makes more sense when you travel to Inverroche, one of the real pioneers of this Cape gin revolution. Its distillery is not in Cape Town, but further up the eastern coast of the province, close to the small seaside town of Stillbaai or Still Bay. As you drive there the landscape opens up with the vistas that seem so indelibly part of South Africa, constant yet changing, as grasslands give way to sudden outcrops of mountains and then the drier, scrubby land that slopes to the sea.

Inverroche, which is rather larger than most distilleries, offers tasting tours where an excellent guide takes you through the distillation process and introduces the local plants used for flavouring. She crushes them to unleash their powerful aromas and invites you to try their peculiar tastes, like the sour fig, a fruit that manages to be sour, sweet and salty at the same time. It is used to make one of the oddest-tasting jams I have ever tried, simultaneously sweet, earthy and peppery hot.

Inverroche makes three gins: a classic juniper dominant one, a greenish tinged version that smells exuberantly of the fresh fynbos herbs and an amber-coloured one which is almost too strongly and distinctively flavoured to taste like a gin. It’s a powerful expression of the South African land, which has caused such endless strife, however much Cape Town might try to turn its back.

Later on a friend tells me that Stillbaai has a reputation for being a holiday place for Afrikaaner families linked to the Broederbond, the semi-secret organisation that was at the forefront of Afrikaaner resistance to the ending of apartheid. Some years back there was a controversial music concert there, where the old South African national anthem was sung.

This is the sort of narrative that Cape Town often tries to avoid, yet is an inescapable part of this country. And it is a reason, perhaps, why these new Cape gins can feel such a right fit for the place, with roots that reach beyond the hipster trends that created them.

vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com