Uncover the Magic of Rooibos in South Africa’s Rugged Mountains

I popped a pod into the Nespresso machine in my resort room, and as tea crammed the mug, I inhaled the woody, caramel aroma of rooibos. The broomlike shrub — its title is Afrikaans for “purple bush” — is native to the Cederberg Mountains of South Africa’s Western Cape, the place temperatures can rise above 100 levels in summer time and drop to close freezing in winter. The area is, in truth, the one place on the planet the place rooibos grows.

In February, I traveled alongside the N7 freeway north of Cape City to expertise the Rooibos Route, an itinerary of farms, factories, tea retailers, and eating places. I sampled rooibos as a tea, in a milkshake, in a martini, in a steak sauce, and whilst an exfoliant throughout a therapeutic massage. 

One morning, I rode a Land Cruiser over filth roads the colour of marmalade with a information, Byron Hartung, and three different visitors of Bushmans Kloof Wilderness Reserve & Wellness Retreat to one among 130 rock-art websites on the property. This was a shamanic website of the San, the nomadic hunter-gatherers who first inhabited South Africa. As we gathered round pictographs of cattle with lengthy eland-type our bodies and figures tilted in dance, Hartung defined that the rock was greater than a canvas to the San — it was a gateway right into a religious world. The work are 3,000 to 10,000 years previous. As I gazed at them, on this sheltered spot on the veld, I felt transported again in time.

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The San handled rooibos as medication, and modern analysis has proven that its distinctive polyphenols could assist coronary heart well being, defend towards sure cancers, and regulate blood sugar. Indigenous South Africans have lengthy been disenfranchised and impoverished, and have seen little of the wealth that has come from the plant’s international growth. They have been additionally not correctly acknowledged for having found and perfected it. However due to an settlement that took impact in 2022, they’ve been formally named the normal data holders for the plant, and neighborhood trusts now obtain 1.5 p.c of the nation’s whole annual gross sales of uncooked rooibos. (The proceeds are meant to enter growth and support tasks all through the nation.)

The thought of the Rooibos Route had percolated for years, as Sanet Stander, who had a tea store within the space, fielded requests from vacationers about visiting farms. In 2012, Stander formally introduced the route and created an internet site that lists actions, equivalent to farm excursions, that vacationers may not have been in a position to organize on their personal.

I drove out to the Wupperthal Unique Rooibos Cooperative, within the Tra-Tra Valley. Greater than 70 small-scale farmers of Indigenous descent develop rooibos on plots of land there, slashing the shrubs by hand with sickles. The cooperative, based in 2009, is housed in a whitewashed constructing with a thatched roof that German missionaries constructed within the early nineteenth century. 

After we entered, heaps of delicate rooibos branches, introduced from the encircling farms and wrapped in white polypropylene luggage, lay on the ground. The village of Wupperthal continues to be a Moravian mission station, and regardless of the title “cooperative,” the church nonetheless owns all the land and the farmers’ houses, a legacy of the dispossession of Indigenous folks in the course of the colonial and apartheid eras. 

In 2021, rooibos grew to become the primary African product to be granted “protected designation of origin” standing. As with champagne in France, the title rooibos is unique to South Africa. “Our ancestors offered rooibos to the missionaries, and it was later commercialized,” Edgar Valentyn, a fifth-generation farmer in Wupperthal, defined to me. “That’s a variety of tea going out into the world. We’re glad it’s being protected so no one else can name their product rooibos. That is particularly good for our farmers who’ve only a small quantity of land.”

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Within the city of Clanwilliam, we stopped on the Ou Tronk Museum, housed in a former jail, to view the historical past of rooibos by a wider lens. The exhibit is stuffed with previous equipment, instruments, teapots, tattered classic packaging, and maps. Informational panels clarify the processing and grading of rooibos. A central characteristic is an previous case with greater than 30 small glass jars of rooibos samples collected by Benjamin Ginsberg, an immigrant from Russia who pioneered the plant’s commercialization at first of the twentieth century.

After an hour’s bumpy drive, we arrived at Skimmelberg, a large-scale natural farm with 300 acres dedicated to rooibos. I joined a gaggle of Scandinavian vacationers within the plantation’s courtyard, the place the fermenting and drying of rooibos leaves happen. I crouched beside a mound of leaves, collected a couple of needle-like strays, and gave them a mild rub. As their deep burnt-orange coloration bled onto my fingertips, I recalled that “Rooibos Tea” was one of many prime 10 colours within the Pantone Trend Coloration Development Report for the approaching season. I imagined the distinctive tone spreading out into the world, by style and different methods. 

The Carmién Tea Store close to Citrusdal is named the gateway to the Rooibos Route, however I selected it as my exit — one final alternative to take pleasure in a cup of tea and a chew to eat. Liezel van der Merwe, Carmién’s gross sales supervisor, talked to me in regards to the South African rugby workforce, the homegrown combined martial arts champ Dricus du Plessis, and Tyla, the South African singer who had simply gained a Grammy the earlier night time. “This stuff maintain the nation collectively,” she mentioned. “That can be what rooibos does. It provides hope for a greater tomorrow.” 

A model of this story first appeared within the December 2024 challenge of Journey + Leisure below the headline “Freshly Brewed.”