Zoë Sheng

Chinese-Canadian - 17-Mar-19 -

Oh - another wine region! Note how the title had changed from a "Cultural Landscape" to just early farmsteads, making this unfortunately still confusing as the other cultural landscape ideas, and mentions said term in the criteria. It would be hard to miss the wine in Cape Town. There are farmsteads far off the city but why go all the way if you can just take a short trip east of Table Mountain?! I picked the Constantia region, just 20 minutes south of Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. The setting of the vineyards sloping down Table Mountain is beautiful on its own. The farms have been here for over 400 years. As a tourist you can have a look a the vineyard, enjoy lunch of dinner, do wine tasting, do a tour of the vineyard if available. This isn't anything special. So let's look at the criteria:

The document claims the Afrikaans language is due to these vineyards - I think not. I don't see any special building styles or materials either, perhaps this is more evident in the farmsteads further out of town after all but it clearly mentions Constantia as example. Did the wine farms impact settlement in the area? Very likely. Does it have a universal impact? Unlikely. Is the same true for all the other vineyards already listed around the world? No but there are plenty of them we would think don't quite belong and yet they keep creeping onto the list. Maybe it's the love for wine.