History: In The Beginning

18th century Cape Town was a bustling Dutch East India Company port. For centuries it was the starting point for all sorts of botanists, explorers, biologists and others of a scientific bent, attracted to the mountainous maritime Cape region at the foot of Africa, perhaps the richest botanical area in the world.
Meanwhile the equally adventurous, seeking to put down different roots by establishing homesteads and farms in more isolated country, yearned for the delicious herbal and China teas they’d relished back home.

Some of their descendants were the Baster people of the Cederberg, who found they could make their own kind of tea from a wild Rooibos-type plant growing high in the mountains. They wrapped picked leaves in hessian cloth, loaded up an obliging donkey or two and brought their haul down to the valleys. During the journey the bundles of leaves would heat up, the oxidisation process would begin and after some rough chopping and a period of drying on flat rocky outcrops, the tea leaves were ready for brewing. The tea they produced, it has to be said, was varied - sometimes yellow often black and not always that good to drink, but the Baster people found they were able to trade it successfully for all sorts of household goods.

Grandpa Benjamin

And thus things might have stayed, were it not for Benjamin Ginsberg, a young Russian from a Moscow tea merchant family, who in 1903, riding through the remote mountains, was fascinated by the potential of this crude wild tea. He began by using old Chinese curing techniques and later incorporated newer methods garnered from Indian tea growing plantations. He encouraged his friend, the local GP Dr. Le Fras Nortier to experiment with propagating the never before cultivated, hard wild seeds, which produced the first successful field of cultivated rooibos.

Henry’s Plantation

Benjamin’s son Henry Charles was the first to plant large dedicated areas of rooibos in the 1940s and encouraged other farmers to follow suit. And he turned Rooibos into a national South African drink.

Benjamin’s grandson Bruce luckily also caught the tea bug. He was able to build on his father’s achievements and continued to farm and cure finest grade rooibos. As he learnt more about tea he realised just how special rooibos actually was. Bruce introduced rooibos to the UK and other international markets, who welcomed it with open arms.
Even with its ever-growing popularity, cultivated rooibos is still cured in much the same traditional way, dried out in the warmth and fresh open air of the mountains without any chemicals or additives. After all, if it’s always worked well, why change it?

History Note

If you’re ever in the area and happen across the Clanwilliam Museum in the foothills of the Cederberg, stop in for a visit. There on display you’ll be able to see Benjamin’s sample case of different varieties of wild tea collected in his quest for the very best.