Confined to a remote South Atlantic island for the last six years of his life, with an empire lost and an army gone, Napoleon Bonaparte still found a way to have wine from this particular Cape Town vineyard shipped out to him.
The estate's history begins in 1685, when Simon van der Stel, the Dutch East India Company's governor at the Cape, was granted a stretch of land behind Table Mountain. Van der Stel had sent scouts ahead to test the soil before committing to the site, and the gamble paid off handsomely: the slopes, cooled year-round by ocean breezes off False Bay, turned out to be among the finest wine-growing land in the entire region. He named the property Constantia, and it has produced wine without interruption ever since, making Groot Constantia the oldest wine estate in South Africa by a wide margin.
A Wine the Whole Continent Wanted
By the early 1700s, the estate had roughly 70,000 vines under cultivation, and its sweet dessert wine, known simply as Constantia wine, had developed a reputation across Europe. Louis Philippe of France is said to have ordered an entire year's vintage for his own use. Frederick the Great of Prussia was a documented drinker of it. Jane Austen wrote it into Sense and Sensibility as a remedy for heartbreak, and Charles Dickens gave it a brief mention in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The most striking name attached to the wine's history, however, belongs to Napoleon Bonaparte. Exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena following his final defeat, he reportedly requested bottles of Constantia wine sent to him there, supplied through the Cloete family, who managed the estate at the time. Whether it was literally his last request, as some accounts claim, remains debated, but the shipping records themselves are genuine: crates of Constantia wine made the long voyage to Saint Helena during his exile, and Groot Constantia has since partnered with the French Embassy and the Napoleon Foundation on exhibitions telling that story with proper documentation.
Still Pouring, Three Centuries Later
The estate has changed hands many times since van der Stel first broke ground, and today operates under the nonprofit Groot Constantia Trust, functioning simultaneously as a working vineyard and a protected heritage site. Its manor house and original wine cellar are national landmarks, ranking among the best-preserved examples of Cape Dutch architecture anywhere in South Africa. In 2003, the estate revived its historic dessert wine under the name Grand Constance, a direct callback to the bottles that once travelled to a dying emperor's table on an island most of Europe had already chosen to forget.
Most visitors taste the wine long before anyone explains any of this history to them. Whether the story changes the flavour is impossible to prove either way. What it reliably changes is the image that comes to mind of who else, three centuries earlier, might have raised the very same glass.