Boschendal

Boschendal (Dutch: wood and dale) is one of the oldest wine estates in South Africa and is located between Franschhoek and Stellenbosch in South Africa's Western Cape.

The farm's title deeds are dated 1685. The estate's first owner, Jean le Long, was one of the party of 200 French Huguenot refugees who were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. He was granted land in the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company in 1688 and the title deed was written in 1713. In 1715 the farm was acquired by another Huguenot, Abraham de Villiers who sold it to his brother Jacques in 1717. The De Villiers family farmed Boschendal until 1879. In 1812 Paul de Villiers and his wife, Anna Susanna Louw, completed a new house at Boschendal on the site of his father's home. This is the homestead as restored today. Among the guests in the later years of the De Villiers era was the British Governor at the Cape, Sir George Grey, who stayed at Boschendal whenever he visited the region.

In 1887 the estate was bought by Cecil Rhodes and formed part of his commercial fruit business, Rhodes Fruit Farms which has become today's Boschendal Farm.

A global phylloxera epidemic, caused by tiny, sap-sucking insects, spread through the Cape vineyards in the 1880s and 1890s, destroying the vines of the Boschendal area in 1890. It caused much damage and led to a farming depression before resistant American vine stocks were introduced on a scale wide enough to stop the epidemic.

In the meantime, farmers needed alternative forms of agriculture and the lucrative fruit industry in California provided a suitable model for the Cape. Pioneering work was done by fruit farmers in Wellington and the Hex River Valley. In 1892, shipping magnate Percy Molteno developed and introduced refrigerated cargo space on Union-Castle shipping lines, between the Cape and the largest consumer markets in Europe, which revolutionized the industry and made the export of fresh fruit an attractive proposition.

Harry Pickstone, an Englishman with experience of growing fruit in California convinced Rhodes that a commercial nursery was needed to propagate new varieties of fruit trees for the industry. Rhodes financed his first venture, the Pioneer Fruit Growing Company.

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Wikipedia