At the end of one of the long, leafy boulevards that line one of Cape Town's swankiest suburbs is the vineyard Klein Constantia, home to a little piece of winemaking history.
The winery produces Vin de Constance, a sweet dessert wine, which was phenomenally popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Napoleon was perhaps its most famous fan, sending instructions for cases to be shipped to him in his exile on Elba. And French poet Charles Baudelaire gave the wine a name-check in his sonnet Sed Non Satiata, alongside opium and other things he didn't enjoy quite as much as his lover's mouth.
The wine and the winery lost their way over the years. But Vin de Constance has made a remarkable comeback since the Jooste family took over the vineyard in 1980.
'It was pretty run down,' says Lowell Jooste, whose father, Douglas, bought it. 'I think there were seven tractors on the farm, but none of them worked.'
The family has built a compound of beautiful Cape Dutch buildings and the vineyard is open for tastings and cellar tours. And they have also begun producing Vin de Constance again. The wine is made from muscat de frontignan grapes, harvested by hand late in the season and matured for four years in the wineries cellars.
Vin de Constance could survive the long ship journey from the Cape colonies to Europe. 'In those days sweet wines were very popular because sugar is a good preservative,' says Jooste, who studied winemaking at the University of California at Davis and under Robert Mondavi.