Region & History

A postal clerk gave this place its present name, not a winemaker. Hermanus Pieters, a Dutch teacher, had grazed his sheep here from the 1820s onward, at a spring right by the bay. Local fishermen soon named the settlement after him: Hermanuspietersfontein. A name with four syllables too many for any envelope. In 1902, a postmaster complained about the endless writing. Hermanuspietersfontein was simply shortened to Hermanus. Two years later, the fishing village was granted town status.

Nobody spoke of wine here for a long time. The farms around the bay kept dairy cattle, cut fynbos for thatched roofs, and lived off fish. That remained the case until 1975, when an advertising man from Johannesburg turned up. Tim Hamilton Russell was searching for the coolest patch of South Africa suitable for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. He found it in a narrow valley behind Hermanus that farmers had long called Hemel-en-Aarde. Heaven and Earth. The mountains hem in the valley so tightly that from below you can barely see anything else.

He planted vines in 1976 and bottled his first vintage in 1981, at a point when the area barely existed in legal terms. South Africa had only just begun surveying vineyard sites in law with the Wine of Origin system, its official appellation control, introduced in 1973, yet Walker Bay was not designated a ward, the smallest of these appellation tiers, until 1981, and even then it was folded into the much larger Overberg. A district of its own, the tier above, did not arrive until May 2004.

Others followed swiftly. In 1989, Burgundy wine merchant Paul Bouchard teamed up with winemaker Peter Finlayson to found Bouchard Finlayson, barely a hill away from Hamilton Russell. Newton Johnson joined in 1995, Creation in 2002, Ataraxia in 2004. With every new cellar, the map grew too.

In 2006, Hemel-en-Aarde Valley and Upper Hemel-en-Aarde Valley were granted their own wards, followed by Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge in 2009, and in 2018 even a single estate, Springfontein Rim, became a ward in its own right. The district now comprises seven wards: the three of the Hemel-en-Aarde valley, plus Bot River, Sunday's Glen, Springfontein Rim, and the wooded Stanford Foothills around the old village of Stanford. A fishing village that nearly lost its unwieldy name now appears on labels found in London and New York.