The Le Marais homestead dates back to circa 1890. Once part of a much larger working farm, producing grapes & other fruits, the property and the surrounding area has gone through major changes over the past century. Le Marais was once accommodation for the farm manager and a focal point for much activity, as can be seen in these old photographs, from ~1931, of the house and the surrounding area.
HISTORY
Le Marais was part of the farm Bel Ombre, which was bought by Johannes Rathfelder from the estate of the late James Hutchinson in 1872. The farm was one of the original farms in the valley that was granted to Johannes van Helsdingen in 1706 by the governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel. Originally called Wit Sleezwyk, the farm subsequently became known as Goedgeloof in 1775 when bought by Josephus Antonius Becker, a surgeon who had just moved from Germany. Mr Becker was very particular about his wine, and even then only released certain vintages and only when he knew they had aged perfectly. In many journals and articles, the wine was famous and said to be ‘really delicious’ and considered almost as good as the legendary Constantia produced nearby. Then finally the name changed to Bel Ombre, (in reference to the shade provided by the numerous silver trees), by its then British owner Hutchinson.
By the time Johannes Rathfelder died, the management and wine making had long since been passed on to his son, Emmanuel Otto Rathfelder. Otto was a talented winemaker who had trained in viticulture in Europe. He had built a new wine cellar where he made wines which won prizes on the wine shows in Europe and carried the name of South African wines forward to the commercial centres of the world.
The house was originally built for Johannes Rathfelder’s widow, Hermina, but she died before it was completed and it was passed on to her daughter Ethel Hermina and, later, to her grandson Eugene Marais. Eugene cultivated and harvested grapes both for export and the wine industry. The many acres of vineyards on the farm were referred to as “The Valley of the Vines” by Eugene’s aunt, the author Joy Packer, in her book of the same name.
In addition, Eugene grew vegetables and bottled olive oil from the existing olive grove. Over the years, the Rathfelder family were scattered around the world and with nobody having a passion for winemaking, tracts of land were subdivided and sold.
A more detailed history stretching back to 1706 follows….
1706 – JOHANNES VAN HELSDINGEN
Land described as being adjacent to Witteboomen (itself adjacent to former governor Simon van der Stel’s enormous estate, Constantia, and indeed partially incorporated into Constantia in 1697) was granted to Johannes van Helsdingen in 1706. Van Helsdingen had arrived at the Cape from Amsterdam in 1796 with his wife Anna Meynen, son Jan Hendrik and daughter Maria Elizabeth. He had then served as Van der Stel’s personal secretary at Constantia for nine years. He called his property Wit Sleeswyk, its name (like that of Witteboomen) inspired by the area’s abundant groves of silver trees.
By 1707 Van Helsdingen had planted 6,000 vines, according to the Opgaafrolle (census return), which listed him as having: 1 wife, 1 son, 1 daughter, 1 knecht (European servant/overseer), 3 male slaves, 1 female slave, 2 slave boys, 1 slave girl, 5 horses and 59 cows. In addition to vines, he was cultivating rye and wheat.
Following Van Helsdingen’s death in 1710, his widow (Anna Meynen) married Jan Gerrit Stoots on 11 April 1711. When Constantia was sub-divided following Van der Stel’s death in 1712, Stoots acquired the 40-morgen Witteboomen portion, selling part of in 1716 to Johannes Franke, who named it Frankengift (later dubbed New Constantia, this is Silverhurst today). When Stoots died in 1724, his stepson Jan Hendrik van Helsdingen bought Witteboomen from his mother (this property would stay in the Van Helsdingen family until 1824, marked on various old maps as ‘Van Elsings’). Wit Sleeswyk remained in the Widow Helsdingen’s name until her death in 1727 when it was sold to Claas Mulder and Jan Hop. However, they sold it within the year to the Beck brothers, Johann Zacharias and Johann Christoffel, who renamed the property Goedgeloof (‘good faith’).
1728 – JOHANN ZACHARIAS BECK
Hailing from Bad Langensalza in Thüringen, Germany, Johann Zacharias Beck arrived at the Cape in 1715 as a soldier. In 1719 he started working as a knecht (on loan from the VOC) for Christiaan Matzdorf (Maasdorp). A fellow German, Maasdorp held the Rondebosje wine pacht (right to sell alcohol in what is now the Rondebosch area, auctioned off annually) six times between 1716 and 1726, and he employed Beck as his ‘bijtapper’ (assistant tavern keeper). In early 1722, furthermore, he gave Beck his blessing to marry his step-daughter, Elsje van As.
In April 1722, Beck’s application to become a vrijburgher was granted, and on 31 August 1722 he successfully bid on one of the Cape wine pachts, paying 7,400 guilders, which he’d have been unable to do without his bijtapper experience and (now) family connections. The following year he bought three pachts, paying 10,750 guilders in total, and he was joined at the Cape by his brother, Johann Christoffel, whom he employed as his own bijtapper/wijnverlater. In 1726 JC Beck was then fortunate enough to marry Anna de Groot, the wealthy widow of the malt beer pachter Rudolph Steenbok (based at the Papenboom brewery which supplied malt beer to Rondebosje pacht holders including the Becks).
While JZ Beck would go on to buy a further 11 pachts over the next 14 years, investing 76,625 guilders in total (and eventually overreaching himself), JC Beck opted to invest in property – more specifically the Liesbeeck farms Boshof, which he purchased from the Ten Dammes of Claasenbosch in 1726 (not coincidentally the year of his fortuitous marriage) and Roodenburg, which he acquired in 1728 (when his brother took over his share of Goedgeloof). By 1735 JC’s tax return showed that he owned 73 slaves and employed two knechten, while his 60,000 vines produced 53 leaguers of wine. ‘All kinds of wine,’ wrote the Lammens sisters, Maria and Johanna, who visited ‘de Heer Bek’ at Boshof in 1736, one year before he returned as a very wealthy man to his native Germany. ‘All of a delicious taste; we found both red and white, and also Muscadel.’
As for JZ, who became the sole owner of Goedgeloof in 1728, he was clearly more interested in wine retail than production despite various setbacks, the most dramatic of which was the murder of two men at his Liesbeeck taphuis or tavern, named Varietas Delectat, in July 1724. After the murderers (three slaves belonging to Johannes Swellengrebel of the farm ‘Ecklenburg’) were found and executed, their heads were placed on poles near the scene of their crime – the tavern in due course, inevitably, becoming known as ‘de Drie Koppen’ (referring to three heads rather than three cups as many customers wrongly assumed!).
That incident aside, with Varietas Delectat finally offloaded to Jan Hendrik van Helsdingen of Witteboomen in June 1729, Beck simply over-reached himself with his pacht investments. By 1730 he was in was in serious financial trouble, involved in a series of court cases for unpaid debts, and in 1732 he was described by the Governor, Jan de la Fontaine, as ‘a man who had been a pachter, yet was now poorer than the poor’.
1730 – CHRISTIAAN MAASDORP
Perhaps helping out his beleaguered former knecht, bijtapper and stepson-in-law, JZ Beck, Christiaan Maasdorp bought Goedgeloof in 1730. He was originally from Pasewalk in northern Germany and had come to the Cape as a sailor in 1697. He then served as the Company’s master wagon builder until 1704 when he became a free burgher.
A prominent member of the burgher militia, eventually being promoted from Sergeant to Quartermaster of the Cape Cavalry in 1721, he was married three times, firstly in 1702 to Maria Basson (daughter of Arnoldus Basson and the freed slave Angela van Bengale, whose half-sister was Anna de Koningh of later Groot Constantia fame), secondly in 1713 to Helena van der Merwe (mother of Elsje van As) and thirdly in 1722 to Cornelia Villion (widow of Hercules du Preez). Benefiting financially from the sale of some properties he’d acquired through marriage, he invested in the wine pacht. From August 1716 to August 1718, from August 1719 to August 1720, and again from August 1724, he held the Company’s wine and brandy concession at Rondebosch – ostensibly making him and Beck rivals although, as in-laws, it seems they may have been working as partners.
Maasdorp retained the burgher militia rank of Quartermaster until 1726, when he retired due to ‘continuous indisposition’. By the beginning of June 1729 he had been widowed for the third and last time, and in 1731 he renounced his right to his late wife Cornelia Villion’s Drakenstein property, Watervliet, transferring it to her son Hercules du Preez junior. He also sold his water mill on the Liesbeeck River, Molenvliet, to Gysbert Ie Febre. Effectively disappearing from the records, Maasdorp lived quietly at Goedgeloof until his death in 1744.
That Maasdorp’s eldest son, Arnoldus, renounced his claim on Goedgeloof in 1744 is perhaps not surprising when you consider that he was heavily committed in the Stellenbosch area (buying several farms while serving as a deacon of the church, a captain of the burgher dragoons and a Heemraad of the district). However, this is not the last we hear of Arnoldus Maasdorp at Goedgeloof…
1744 – JACOBUS VAN REENEN
Goedgeloof was sold from Christiaan Maasdorp’s estate to Jacobus van Reenen, Master of the Weeskamer and one of the Cape’s wealthiest men. Originally from Memel, a coastal town in Prussia (today Lithuania), Graf Jacob von Renen [sic] was said to have fled from his homeland after fighting a duel in which his opponent had died. He boarded the ship 'Astrea' at Goree in Zeeland on 18 October 1721 and disembarked at the Cape on Thursday 5 March 1722.
Serving as adelhorst (one rank higher than private) until 1724 when he was appointed as a segelslager (seal bearer) in the service of the VOC, he became a burgher in early 1725 and married Johanna Siekermans, a weesmeisie (orphan) from Amsterdam, on 1 July 1725. On 5 February 1726 he was promoted to the rank of corporal, after which his rise through the ranks was rapid (sergeant on 20 January 1729, Brandmeester on 30 August 1732, and Commissioner of Civil and Marriage Affairs on 14 December 1734). On 8 April 1743 he was chosen as a member of the Orphan Chamber, which dealt with the estates of persons who died intestate and left heirs who were minors.
Throughout this time, Van Reenen farmed, speculated in property, rented out houses and had interests in the supply of meat and wine to the Company. He was also a moneylender.
It’s no wonder that he became one of the most prosperous men in the Colony, his vast landholdings including the Liesbeeck farms Welgelegen, Velthuizen and Boschheuvel (originally Jan van Riebeeck’s property, today Bishop’s Court) as well as Langverwacht near Kuilsriver, Paardevlei in Hottentots-Holland and De Voorzorg in Goudini.
At Goedgeloof, Van Reenen seems to have been an absentee landlord, with the 1756 Opgaafrolle revealing that only slaves lived there. The 1762 Opgaafrolle showed a return of 20 leaguers of wine from Van Reenen’s extensive operations, no doubt including Goedgeloof. It’s perhaps noteworthy that his son Jacob (born in 1727, famous as one of the leaders of the Cape Patriots who travelled to Amsterdam in 1778 to lay the burghers’ grievances before the Council of Seventeen) was married to Maria Franke from the adjacent farm Frankengift (originally part of Witteboomen, later called New Constantia, now named Silverhurst).
When the older Jacob van Reenen died on 7 June 1764, his estate was valued at 180,000 gulden. However, it was not one of his own children who acquired Goedgeloof through inheritance but rather Arnoldus Maasdorp, who now put in a claim on his late father’s old property (the claim he had renounced 20 years previously).
1764 – ARNOLDUS MAASDORP
In 1762, aged 52, Arnoldus Maasdorp had asked to be relieved of all his burgher duties in Stellenbosch because he intended to sell his various farms (including Vergelegen, which he’d acquired in 1757) and settle in Cape Town with his third wife, Elsabé le Febre (the daughter of the man to whom Christiaan Maasdorp had sold his Liesbeeck water mill, Molenvliet, three decades previously).
It may have been for nostalgic reasons that he suddenly wanted the property where his late father had spent his final years, or it may have been because the property had flourished after years of investment by the Van Reenens. Either way, he would live there for the last few years of his life.
Given that the subsequent owner of Goedgeloof would be highly regarded for his wines, it seems safe to say that Maasdorf tended his vineyards well.
In 1772, the Swedish naturalist and physician Anders Sparrman, was working at Alphen as tutor to the children of the Resident at Simon’s Town, Johan Kirsten. He wrote that the farms lying next to Constantia produced ‘merely the common Cape wine, notwithstanding that they have been planted with vine-stocks from [the Constantia vineyards], as well as with some brought from the banks of the Rhine, whence it is supposed that the true Constantia sort originally comes.’
Maasdorp’s son, Christiaan George Maasdorp (born in 1737 to Anna Sophia van Brakel), was involved in the wine trade, e.g. in 1782 he submitted a request to the Political Council in which he stated that he had earned his living for many years with ‘the buying and again selling of wine by wholesale’. However, he doesn’t seem to have had much interest in wine farming, because in 1775 Goedgeloof was sold by his step-mother, Elsabé le Febre, to Josephus Anthonius Becker, who initially purchased it in partnership with another German immigrant, Johann Heinrich Greybe, a supervisor at the Groote Schuur. However, Becker soon became sole owner.
1775 – JOSEPHUS ANTHONIUS BECKER
Born in 1746 in Pfaffendorp, Koblenz, Germany, Josephus Anthonius Becker was a surgeon who had trained at the famous military school at Württemberg. He arrived at the Cape aboard the Landscroon in 1765 and was employed by the VOC until receiving his burgher papers in 1775. He was married to Johanna Elizabeth Moller and they had no children.
In November 1779, Becker applied for his property (‘the farm called Goed geloof, situated in the Cape district, at the Witte Boomen…an area of 60 morgen and 500 sq. rds’) to be resurveyed because there were no beacons marking its boundaries, and he didn’t want to risk cultivating land belonging to the Company (this request was granted). In February 1781, he applied to be granted a small plot adjoining his property (‘6 morgen 53 sq. roods and 5 sq. feet in extent’), for which he was prepared to pay four schillings in quitrent annually (also granted). He made a similarly successful application in February 1781 (for a plot ‘6 morgen 256 sq. rds. and 35 sq. ft. in extent’).
Evidence that Becker was prospering also comes from contemporary visitor accounts. On 6 October 1777, for example, Captain Robert Jacob Gordon enjoyed the hospitality at Goedgeloof, as recalled by one of his companions, William Paterson, in his Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the Hottentots, and Caffraria, 1777 – 1779.
‘Captain Gordon and myself left Cape Town and proceeded along the bottom of Table Mountain, leading towards Constantia,’ he wrote. ‘We dined at the house of Mr Becker, which is only about two miles distant from Constantia, being well situated and sheltered from north-west and south-east winds. This place produced excellent wine though the situation is rather low. Constantia is, however, preferable to all other parts of this district, not only because it is more elevated, but on account of the nature of the soil, which is a light sandy loam.’
All Gordon recorded was this: ‘Continued on our route along the Table Mountain range and at about two o'clock arrived at 't Goed Geloof, a wine-farm belonging to a certain Becker, where we ate, and after having strolled around we rode on at five o'clock to the farm of Pieter Ecksteen called Bergvliet, where we spent the night.’
However, it should be noted that this was more than he had to say about the famous Constantia vineyards the following day: ‘Went to the Constantias in the afternoon and returned to Bergvliet in the evening.’
The ‘Constantias’ (plural) were Groot/Great Constantia and Little/Lower Constantia (later known as Hoop-op-Constantia), which were then respectively in the hands of the elderly Jacobus van der Spuy and the Colyn family – the former selling Groot Constantia in January 1778 to Jan Serrurier, who in turn sold it to Hendrik Cloete within the year; the Colyns having been at Little/Hoop since 1718. It’s important to note that only these two vineyards produced the ‘true’ Constantia wine. Becker would never have dreamt of claiming to produce ‘Constantia’.
However, there is irrefutable evidence that Becker’s wines were considered almost as good as Contantia. When French explorer and ornithologist Francois le Vaillant published his Travels into the Interior parts of Africa, by the Way of the Cape of Good Hope, in the Years 1780, 81, 82, 83, 84 & 85, he described the muscats of ‘Becker’ and ‘Hendrick’ as ‘the most esteemed, those which approach nearest to the wines of Constantia’.
In 1790, Becker was released from his official duties as surgeon-major of the burghers, having been ‘dangerously ill, and still suffering from oppression in the chest’. From now on, his focus was Goedgeloof, which he turned into a very successful operation, even during the turbulent years of British occupation. In 1806, the year in which the Cape finally became a British Colony, Becker resubmitted an earlier application to double the size of his property, with Leibbrandt’s Precis of the Archives recording: ‘Becker (Anthony Josephus); Inhabitant of this Colony; had, last year, applied to the Batavian Government for about 60 morgen of ground near his place, called "Goedgeloof," situated behind the "Wijnbergen." This land had been surveyed by order of that Government, and examined by a commission to fix the value. The grant was however impeded by the surrender of the Colony to His Majesty's Arms, and therefore Petitioner prays that the grant may be effected of the said Land, which by the successive possessors of petitioner's place, has bona-fide been partly planted with wood, and cultivated already.’
Although Becker and his wife had no children, they had been joined on their farm by their nephew, Franciscus Josephus Becker, in 1793. Born in the Middle Mosel winegrowing centre of Bernkastel-Kues in 1774, he married Johanna Magdalena Rauch on 11 May 1795. Their six children were born at Goedgeloof, where there were now two houses on the property. Uncle and nephew seem to have farmed in partnership until the former’s death on 25 February 1808.
1708 – FRANCISCUS JOSEPHUS BECKER
It seems the younger Becker may have brought vine cuttings with from Germany, as well as some new farming methods, based on a ‘valuable tract’ written by a certain Mr Fisher that was included in Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire in Every Part of the World (1814).
‘I cannot omit mentioning the vineyard of Mr Becker, near Constantia, which is planted with the vines that gentleman carried with him from the banks of the Rhine,’ wrote Fisher. ‘It is unlike the vineyards of the colony nailed on espaliers of bamboo of considerable height. Some small quantity of wine has been made from it; but the proprietor, anxious for the credit and reputation of his wine, feels disinclined to sell any of it until it has arrived at a certain age, when he can speak with certainty as to the success of his vineyard and the goodness of his wine. Without calculating on the effect of age on this wine, it is impossible not to present judgement on it by pronouncing it as really delicious.’
When pioneering wine critic André Jullien published his encyclopaedic Topographie de Tous les Vignobles Connus in 1816, he described the wines coming from Groot and Hoop op Constantia as ‘some of the best liqueur wines in the world’. He classified the red and white wines of Constantia as first class, and the Cape muscats as second class, noting that of these, ‘The most esteemed crus are those of Becker and Hendrick.’ (Note: He may have relied entirely on Le Vaillant in stating this…)
In the meantime Becker’s first wife had died. In 1811 he married Maria Liesching and in 1816 they moved to De Tijgerbergen (now Altydgedacht in the Durbanville area) with their children, while Becker’s children with his first wife stayed at Goedgeloof with their great-aunt, Johanna Moller. In due course Becker-Liesching family bonds were further tightened by the marriage of his eldest daughter, Johanna Elizabeth Becker (1796 –1858) to his brother-in-law, Frederick Arend Gysbert Liesching (1792-1855).
Becker was clearly highly regarded as a winemaker. In 1821 the governor, Lord Charles Somerset, proposed the establishment of a Cape Wine Trade Committee to determine exactly where ‘errors with regard to Cape wine’ were being committed, resulting in poor wines reaching the ‘home’ market of Britain. It’s significant that Becker was not only elected as a committee member, representing the Cape district alongside the likes of Jacob Cloete of Groot Constantia, but also appointed to a Central Committee of just three individuals tasked with making recommendations regarding viticulture and winemaking methods. The other two individuals were Frans Roos, the owner of Moddergat in the Hottentots-Holland area, and PH Polemann, a local chemist. They were asked for input on (among other things) choice of vineyard soil, viticultural methods, wine presses, and the treatment/ageing of wine before it was exported.
As early as 30 January 1826, Becker, Roos and Polemann submitted their proposals for making Cape dry white wine, briefly summarised as follows:- Only good grapes should be used. Green, damaged and rotten berries must be removed. Instead of fermenting the stems and skins with the must – as was the custom – the berries should first be stripped from the stems. After trampling the berries, the juice should be separated from the skins immediately. The juice should then ferment in barrels for several days. The barrels should be kept full during this period to allow the removal of dirt along with the foam. The dirt and foam should be collected in a bucket for distillation to make brandy. As long as the must was fermenting vigorously, the barrel should be left open. After the foam subsided, a ‘wingerdclaar’ should be placed over the bunghole, with the bung on top. (The purpose of this was to limit air intake, and consequently oxidation). The must should then be left in the fermentation vessel until its sweetness disappeared. Next, the wine should be tapped into a clean, sulphured barrel. If the wine was thin, i.e. watery, it should be fortified with a gallon of good spirits or brandy per leaguer. It should stand like this for a while, being tapped twice more, with a small amount of good spirits or brandy added each time.
The Central Committee’s recommendations as well as reports of its proceedings up to 2 February 1826 were printed in English and Dutch and distributed among the various sub-committees and individual wine farmers. Thereafter, the Central Committee busied itself with making models of screw presses, ordering French and English publications on viticulture and winemaking methods, and officially opening an office for the tasting of wine and brandy samples at the Cape Town Chamber of Commerce (next to the Parade). After January 1827, however, all Central Committee activities seem to have ceased – apparently due to poor support from wine farmers and a lack of funds.
As for Becker, 1827 was the year in which Goedgeloof was transferred into his name, by Power of Attorney that had been granted by Johanna Moller to Frederick Liesching, Becker’s brother-in-law who was also his son-in-law (and to whom Becker sold Altydgedacht in 1832).
Unfortunately, however, close ties and complicated financial arrangements with the Lieschings ultimately resulted in Becker’s demise. He mortgaged Goedgeloof to assist his in-laws with their various insolvencies, and eventually had to give up the farm – a sad end for Becker, who ended up a very poor old man, his daughter eventually writing to the authorities to request a pauper’s burial.
Goedgeloof went to the liquidator of the Liesching estate, EDWARD LANDSBERG, who doesn’t seem to have produced any wine, with the wine cellar said to have been destroyed in a fire. In 1855 a new era began when Goedgeloof was acquired by British military surgeon James Hutchinson.
1855 – JAMES HUTCHINSON
Dr James Hutchinson had served as Secretary to the Medical Board of Bengal and Private Secretary to the Honourable President of the Council of India. Not only did he write a treatise on the general and medical management of Indian gaols, but he also published two volumes of poetry.
Born in Scotland in 1796, Hutchinson first came to the Cape in 1836 on sick leave, evidently recuperating sufficiently well to write The Sunyassee, or Pilgrim of India, and Other Poems while purchasing 10 farms east of Palmiet River, which flows through the Elgin valley to an estuary between Betty’s Bay and Kleinmond. While living at one of these farms, Dunghye Park near Caledon, he wrote the preface to the first edition of The Sunyassee in November 1837: ‘An uninterrupted residence of nearly seventeen years in India, and latterly too assiduous attention to business, fortunately or unfortunately, as the public award may ultimately determine, drove me from its shores, to seek renewed health, in the more genial climate of the Cape of Good Hope.’
Hutchinson returned to India in April 1842 but quit the Medical Board in 1845, eventually retiring not to his beloved birthplace, Scotland, but to South Africa.
After purchasing Goedgeloof in 1855, he decided to rename it as Bel Ombre and it was here that he lived (in the older, undamaged longhouse, which he renovated) for the next 25 years, even after acquiring Klein Constantia in 1866. After his death in 1870, he was buried at Bel Ombre, bequeathing his properties to his three sons on condition that they live there. The brothers declined and the properties were all sold – most notably Dunghye Park to Matthijs Johannes de Villiers; Klein Constantia to Dirk Gysbert Cloete (youngest son of Groot Constantia owner Jacob Pieter Cloete); and Bel Ombre to Johannes Rathfelder.
1872 – JOHANNES RATHFELDER
Another German born in Württemberg in 1821, Johannes Rathfelder immigrated to South Africa as a young man. Not to be confused with his cousin, Johann Georg Rathfelder, who immigrated around the same time and went on to become known as the ‘king of landlords’ running the famous Rathfelder’s Hotel in Wynberg, ‘our’ Rathfelder established a successful butchery nearby. He was married to Susannah Elizabeth MacFarlane, who was born in Wynberg in 1836.
Rathfelder was clearly prosperous at a time when the owners of the more famous Constantia farms were not (the Colyns of Hoop-op-Constantia having declared bankruptcy in 1857, followed by the Cloetes of Groot Constantia in 1872). It was Rathfelder who consolidated Bel Ombre into a very large property, converting all the quitrent land historically attached to Goedgeloof into freehold. He built a fine house, the first manor house built in the Victorian style in Constantia. (The old house where Hutchinson had lived was renamed Sweet House and used as a guest cottage.)
Rathfelder also resumed winegrowing at Bel Ombre, where vineyards covered virtually the entire hill. He built a new wine cellar, and his wines seem to have impressed visitors to the Cape, including EF Sandeman whose Eight Months in an Ox-Waggon: Reminiscences of Boer Life was published by Griffith and Farran in London in 1880.
Describing his stay at Rathfelder’s Hotel, Sandeman noted: ‘Rathfelder’s hotel is connected with the owners of one of the Constantia vineyards, so has a better quality of colonial wines than I ever met with in any but a private house elsewhere.’
However, the wines enjoyed by Sandeman were not the famous ‘Constantia’ dessert wines, which he found ‘too sweet and strong for anything but a liqueur’.
These were difficult years for wine farmers, not only because of phylloxera which had first been detected at the Cape in 1866 (though only arrived in Constantia in 1898).
In 1902 (seven years before his death on 20 November 1909, aged 89), Rathfelder handed over the management of Bel Ombre to his son, Emmanuel Otto (born on 15 April 1879). By all accounts, ‘Otto’ was a talented winemaker, having trained in Europe. Equipping his cellars with vats made from Baltic oak and winning prizes on the wine shows in Europe (alongside the Cloetes of Alphen and Bertrams of Hoog Constantia), he was well known as a bon vivant. His wife was Eveline ‘Evie’ Blanche Tait and they had four children: Adine Islay Viotti, Brenda Evelyn Rathfelder, John MacFarlane Rathfelder and Gladys Juliette Schuddinh.
When Otto died on 1 May 1942, his gravestone was engraved with a line from the Song of Solomon 7:12 (King James Bible version): ‘Let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear.’ His son, John MacFarlane Rathfelder, took the reins at Bel Ombre and was later joined by his own son, John Otto MacFarlane ‘Johnny’ Rathfelder. Although they reportedly made a great success of the farm, increasing development in the area more or less forced them to sell Bel Ombre in 1969.
However, Bel Ombre was already smaller than it had been when Johannes Rathfelder purchased and consolidated it, with some subdivisions having already occurred among his children. Otto’s oldest sister was Matilda Susannah, who married August Henry Petersen (a medical doctor who signed Johannes Rathfelder’s death certificate in 1809). Their niece (?) was the author Joy Petersen Packer, whose popular novel Valley of the Vines was set in this valley. Another sister was Florence Agnes, who married Sir Eustace Edward Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes (their grandson is Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the British explorer and writer who spent part of his childhood with his widowed mother and paternal grandparents in this valley, attending Wetpups up until the age of 12).
Then there was Otto’s youngest sister, Ethel Hermina, who was married to Peter Maurice Marais…
It was Ethel Hermina’s son, Eugene ‘Gigi’ Marais (born 2 May 1913), who cultivated and harvested grapes both for export and the wine industry on his family’s portion of Bel Ombre, duly known as Les Marais. He also grew vegetables and bottled olive oil from an existing olive grove, but his passion was wood carving – and an ‘inventive disposition’ saw him making everything from furniture to turbines (not to mention losing several fingers in a circular saw accident later in life).
While most of Bel Ombre has long since been an upmarket residential suburb, comprising plots of various sizes surrounding a meadow, winegrowing has resumed at Le Marais – or at least on parts of the erf that were sub-divided and have now been partially reconsolidated. From Muscat de Frontignan vines planted in 2012, a natural sweet is made from hand-picked, vine-desiccated grapes – just as it was in the late 1700s when Becker’s Muscats were famous, considered almost as good as the legendary Constantia produced nearby.