Rickety Bridge sits near Franschhoek, the area of the Cape Colony set aside by the Dutch to accommodate the immigrant Huguenots, when Franch rescinded the Treaty of Nantes, which had given the protestant Huguenots the right to worship in their own way. In the opening years of the nineteenth century, a family called Peppler amalgamated their wine farm holdings into one unit called simply 'A piece of ground', part of which was to become Rickety Bridge.
For the Pepplers, it was a judicious move. At that
time, in Europe, wine had reached the stage of a necessity. The water in rivers
stank with raw sewerage and the growing industrial waste, (falling into the
Thames was a death sentence, not because few people could swim, but from
swallowing the stinking poisoned water).
Napoleon had closed the ports to export to anywhere British. Britain had added to the blockade the sanction of high import tariff -
with a preferential one for South Africa. The supply of French and continental
wine had, through all this, shrunk to what could be smuggled or slipped past
the blockade by the Americans or other neutrals, and sales of South African
wine boomed on a worldwide basis. At the turn of the century the price had been
60 Rix dollars for a 160 gallon leaguer, but, by Waterloo in 1815, it had risen
as high as 180 Rix dollars for good wine, a threefold increase.
