Roman Historian Pliny the Elder may have felt that there was always something new out of Africa, but what was new to him then was ancient custom to Africans. Wine, for instance. Three thousand years before he had his first glass of wine, the viniculture industry thrived in the Nile Delta. From today's perspective that is five thousand years ago. Trade between ancient Egypt and Palestine had brought the grapevine to Africa and soon wine was a vital component for the pharoahs in this life and in the life to come. On the walls of their tombs they depicted winemaking scenes, and included large stone jars of wine in their provisions for the afterlife. Vineyards spread throughout the Delta, to the towns of the upper Nile and to the large oases. Further along the northern shores of Africa, in what is today Algeria, a viniculture of such sophistication prospered that the Romans found they had much to learn. The region became the major vineyard for their empire. Over the next two thousand years its vineyards sometimes flourished, sometimes waned but less than 150 years ago Algeria was the third largest wine producer in the world. Elsewhere on the vast continent, wine was bartered and sold along the flourishing east-west trade routes, with merchants proclaiming their wines in the great cities of Mali and Somalia and down the east coast to the hilltop acropolis of Great Zimbabwe. In Thabani Wines the legacy lives on ...
Thabani is bulding a winery in the foothills of the majestic Drakensberg mountains
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