The Cape’s wheatlands and vineyards are beautiful, beloved and in trouble. Their story begins thousands of years ago with wild yeast.
If Cape Town has a global identity beyond the city limits it’s wine and wheat – the terrior of the Western Cape, the scenery tourists flock to see and the wine farms they long to experience.
Wheat and grapes carpet the area today – the wheatlands turning gold in early summer, the vineyards running green-gold up the mountain slopes, canola in season turning fields psychedelic yellow.
We take these crops so completely for granted that it’s easy to forget they’re imported species with all the risks and dangers of alien plants. Growing them at scale has reshaped the soil, the water and the food on our plates.
But in a time of rapidly changing climate, a looming El Niño promising unprecedented heat and drought and farming costs skyrocketing, wheat and wine farming are in deep trouble. We need to ask how stable the industry is that supplies the Western Cape’s legendary scenery. And what would be left if it failed?
Over the coming instalments we’ll meet the people who farm those fields and vineyards and ask what all this cultivation has done to the ground beneath and the food chain above. But as a prelude, let’s ask where bread and wine came from.
When we trace our shift from hunter gatherers to agriculture thousands of years ago, these are the crops that underpinned it. Both are civilisation’s greatest inventions in food and pleasure and both began as lucky accidents, owing their existence to the same invisible ally: yeast.
As a prelude to this series, it’s fascinating to look back in time to where it all began.
Bread came first – astonishingly, before farming itself. In the black basalt desert of north-eastern Jordan, archaeologists found charred crumbs of flatbread at a hunter-gatherer site called Shubayqa, baked around 14,400 years ago. That is around four thousand years before anyone deliberately planted a seed.
These early cooks ground wild wheat, barley and club-rush tubers, mixed the flour with water, and baked it on hot stones. Bread, it seems, was so good that it may have helped talk our ancestors into inventing agriculture in the first place.
And invent it they did. About 10,000 years ago, across the Fertile Crescent, people tamed wild grasses – einkorn and emmer – and the loaf became a staple.
The Egyptians then turned baking into an art: dough left out overnight caught wild yeast, rose by morning and leavened bread was born. They baked dozens of shapes and flavours and paid their workers in it.
From the Nile the loaf marched with every civilisation that followed – the daily bread of empires, the thing you break to anchor a meal.
Wine’s origin story is nearly as old and even more romantic. The earliest chemical fingerprints of grape wine – tartaric acid staining the insides of clay jars – come from Neolithic villages in what is now Georgia, around 6000 BC: roughly 8,000 vintages ago.
Close behind are jars from the Zagros Mountains of Iran, a few centuries younger. The likeliest beginning is probably simple: someone left a heap of wild grapes in a vessel, the yeasts living on the skins got to work and the sweet juice transformed itself into something that made people forget their troubles for a while.
Same yeast, same magic. Saccharomyces cerevisiae – the single microbe behind both – eats sugar then breathes out carbon dioxide and alcohol. In dough the gas lifts the loaf, in the grape the alcohol becomes wine. Bread and wine are the same small miracle told two different ways.
Then they travelled. Grapevines domesticated in the Caucasus spread through Mesopotamia and Egypt. The seafaring Phoenicians carried cuttings across the Mediterranean. The Greeks gave wine a god in Dionysus, the Romans crowned another in Bacchus, and Rome’s legions planted vineyards across Europe wherever they marched – Gaul, Iberia, the Rhine, and, far later, they arrived at the very tip of Africa.
Bread’s grasses spread the same way, tucked into the packs and granaries of every migrating people, until they too reached the Cape.
By the time the two arrived side by side at the bottom of Africa, they’d become far more than food. Bread and wine sit at the heart of harvests, feasts, toasts and sacraments the world over – the shared loaf, the raised cup, the sense that something ordinary has been made holy.
They’re what happens when raw nature – a fistful of seeds, a bunch of fruit – is coaxed, with patience and a little wild fermentation, into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Which is exactly where this series begins. Because to grow bread and wine at scale you need land – a great deal of it, cleared and ploughed and planted – and in the Western Cape that land already belonged to something: renosterveld and fynbos, one of the richest small floras on Earth. And of course to people already there who were forcibly displaced or enslaved.
In agricultural terms, the loaf and the cup are an agrarian triumph. What they were laid down upon and what it costs to keep them coming, is the story we’re setting out to tell. DM
Where Bread and Wine goes next.* Tomorrow we sit down with a botanist to understand what monocrop wheat and wine farming has done to the Cape’s vegetation and soil. We’ll then spend time with a grape farmer then a wheat farmer, to learn what the work really asks of the land and the people who work it.*
Then we’ll look at the science on the chemicals and fertilisers these crops lean on and what filters through into our water and our food. We’ll close with a wrap-up that weighs the loaf and the cup against what they cost.
For now, though, tear a piece of bread and raise a glass – and remember that both began thousands of years ago with a little wild yeast and a great deal of luck.
Tomorrow: A land that can forget itself
