The James Sedgwick Distillery

Born in 1811, he joined the British East India Company as a midshipman at a very early age and was only 22 when he took command of his first ship in 1833. The British East India Company by then had taken over from the Dutch and the French, the major trading destinations in the Far East. So, large numbers of its heavily laden East Indiamen plied the route around the Cape between Great Britain and the Far East.

As commander of one of these ships, James Sedgwick would have been a regular visitor to Cape Town. It must have been during one such visit that he met Mary Bush Parke, whose parents owned Parke’s Hotel, and married her 1839.

James Sedgwick retired from the sea in 1850 as the master of the tea clipper Undine and a member of a small band of elite seamen at the helm of the fastest sailing ships of their time, racing annually from China via the Cape to England with the first tea of the new season on board. Sedgwick must have been quite a remarkable man.

Although he had become a landlubber, he lost none of his love of the sea. He was obviously held in high regard in maritime circles for in 1853 Oxford Press published the first edition of his Golden Hints to Young Mariners.

I found it quite amazing to discover that after more than 150 years this “cheap and available little volume”, as he described it, is still regularly reprinted with copies available from the amazon.com website.

Images © James Sedgwick Distillery

In 1855 he produced a publication of a more technical nature under the title The True Principles of the Laws of Storms, on the movement of hurricanes in the northern and southern hemispheres. It was one of three treatises bound together under the title Law of Storms.

After his retirement Sedgwick opened a tavern, The Captain’s Rooms, in St George’s Street in the heart of Cape Town. The tavern was on the premises where Cleghorn and Harris later established their department store, and the foundation of the House of Sedgwick was laid.

It soon became a popular port of call with seamen on shore leave and during this time James Sedgwick conceived the idea of distributing liquor products, including fortified wines, cigars and tobacco.

And so the company J Sedgwick and Co was founded in 1859 with the first store in Michau Street, today known as Sedgwick Lane. Later the company opened offices and tasting rooms in a building opposite the Captain’s Room on the corner of St George’s and Strand Streets. After his death in 1872, two of his four sons, Charles and Alfred, continued the business which grew strongly under their leadership.

In addition to selling local wines and spirits the company also imported whisky and other fortified drinks. Alfred spent time in France and California to study winemaking and he subsequently became one of the Cape’s finest connoisseurs of wine. The company flourished and to ensure quality the House of Sedgwick bought a number of their own distilleries from which to produce brandy and fortified wines.

In 1886 they bought a distillery on the banks of the Berg River at what was known as Catryntjes Drift. The very place where The James Sedgwick Distillery is situated today. In 1919 the company was sold to Gerhardus Francois Jooste selling only locally produced liquor. After his death in 1933, his son, Gerhard Danford Jooste, took over the business.

Jooste was in turn joined in the business by his sons and in 1970 sold the company to Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery, which is today part of Distell. In 1977, the brand Three Ships was launched out of a small distillery in Stellenbosch called Robertson & Buxton.

In 1990 the brand had grown to beyond the distillery’s capacity and the whisky operations were transferred to The James Sedgwick Distillery in Wellington. The distillery is known as “The Home of South African Whisky”. Using grain and malt, various blends, single malts and single grains are produced here today under the Three Ships, Bain’s Cape Mountain Whisky, Harrier and Knights labels.

Since 1886 the distillery has had only had 7 managers with Andy Watts having been responsible for the companies South African whisky portfolio since the move from R & B to Wellington in 1990. Although no longer the manager of the distillery Watts is still responsible for the whisky quality and innovation.

He was awarded the Whisky Magazine’s Global Icon Master Distiller / Master Blender title in 2018 and Global Icon World Whisky Ambassador title in 2020 before being the magazine’s 70th inductee into their Whisky Hall of Fame in 2021 in recognition for his 37 years of service devoted to establishing South African whisky onto the World Whisky map.

The James Sedgwick Distillery is currently the only commercial whisky distillery on the continent of Africa.

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