In this detailed, deeply researched and persuasive volume, the prominent historian of West Africa, Paul Nugent, reminds us that current touristic impressions of the South African wine industry are the product of a quite shallow history—notwithstanding centuries of wine production. He traces the modern story of South African wine to the phylloxera infestation that first devastated vines in Europe and arrived in South Africa by the 1870s and pursues the narrative in nine roughly chronological chapters. He concludes his account with South Africa’s bans on alcohol consumption during the COVID pandemic and COVID shocks to international markets. These bookends emphasize a theme that Nugent returns to repeatedly—the interplay between external impulses and local factors in the modern history of wine in South Africa.

Although South African wine has in recent decades embraced a distinctly global outlook, the industry still very much bears the weight of a deeper history of enslaved labor and subsequent worker exploitation that continued well into the twentieth century and in some respects continues today. Wine farmers relied heavily on the notorious dop system that involved paying a portion of wages in wine and which contributed to a heritage of alcohol abuse among the rural poor in the Cape. Nugent has decided, however, to largely avoid discussion of labor practices. As a result, Race, Taste and the Grape is not quite the definitive text that it might have been. Readers who approach the book without a knowledge of the history of labor in the Cape, including students of comparative wine and alcohol history, will find missing a crucial element in comprehending the complex forces that shaped the history of wine in South Africa. Such readers may also find themselves a bit bogged down in detail, sorting through a sometimes overwhelming number of personalities, wineries, wine types, regulatory entities and so forth. Nugent does provide very helpful periodic summaries that move the narrative forward and focus attention on his key arguments and themes. Nugent also includes more than thirty tables that document critical trends in wine production over the last century.

In telling his story, Nugent has had to contend with a surprising paucity of archival materials, reflecting the distance that the South African state put between itself and the regulatory apparatus. The phylloxera experience impressed on wine farmers and processors, as well as government officials and politicians, the need to control vineyard practices. Facing rising pressure from temperance forces, the industry also sought to have a strong voice in the determination of regulation and on levels of production and pricing. The key instrument at the center of the semi-official wine governance regime was the Koöperatieve Wynbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika, founded in 1918 and remaining a central character in the wine story into the late 1990s. Over decades, and in delicate balance with periodic parliamentary commissions, a web of rules emerged that made the South African industry among the most highly regulated in the world. Following this narrative, readers are treated to a remarkable case study of the development of an industry in the context of the rise of Afrikaner economic nationalism and apartheid and the subsequent dismantling of that system. The history of wine illustrates in particularly striking terms the politics of segmentation, with various categories of wine farmers often at odds over policy, not to mention wholesalers, retailers and representatives of other elements of the alcohol economy. Nugent also traces the complex roles of the temperance movement with its local and racially diverse roots and its powerful connections to the international forces that had succeeded in banning distillation in tropical Africa and sharply limiting and taxing its importation. A number of scholars have explored the racial dynamics of these movements and especially their manifestation in the so-called Durban System of alcohol control; Nugent shows how those policies both complemented and conflicted with state controls over the consumption of wine.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, Nugent has ordered his analysis of the history of wine through a series of intersecting “fields” that inform his discussion of key moments of change. But rather than write a book through that lens he has chosen to focus more on “individual stories” (35)—of individuals (almost all of whom are white men), businesses and organizations. This approach gives this book a distinctively intimate and local feel. Although the book’s title signals a “global perspective,” this local orientation conveys more accurately the historical experience of an industry that at every point confronts external shocks and opportunities through the complexities of particularly South African political, cultural, economic, and geographic realities. Realities in which the question of race is always evident. In the latter part of the book Nugent deftly untangles these complexities in his exploration of the elimination of racial restrictions on alcohol consumption in the early 1960s, examination of the rise and subsequent end of international boycotts, and finally in his discussion of the fate of wine in a new rainbow nation with its surprising (to wine farmers) embrace of free markets.