Franschhoek was settled in 1688 by roughly 180 French Huguenot refugees, and the valley kept their vine cuttings long after it lost their language. Farms were granted with names carried from Europe — La Motte, La Provence, Cabriere, Champagne — and those names outlived French itself, which had faded from daily speech by the 1750s. A Franschhoek and Stellenbosch wine tour from Cape Town retraces that inheritance in reverse, moving inland from the peninsula toward two valleys divided by a single mountain ridge. Stellenbosch is the older of the pair. Simon van der Stel laid it out in 1679 on an island in the Eerste River, making it the second European settlement established in South Africa after Cape Town. Its oaks were planted for shade and for cooperage. Its central streets still follow the original grid, and water furrows run beside several of them. The Cape Dutch gable — white, curved, dated in relief above a front door — reached its most confident form on the werfs that ring the town. Boschendal's manor house of 1812, on the Groot Drakenstein side of the ridge, remains the reference example, its thatch pitched steep enough to shed winter rain. Geology explains much of the rest, and a Franschhoek and Stellenbosch wine tour from Cape Town tour crosses two distinct soil systems inside an hour of driving. Decomposed granite lies at the foot of the Simonsberg. Sandstone and shale climb toward the Franschhoek Pass, cut by Charles Michell's convict labour in 1825 along an older elephant track. Cool air drains off the mountains at night and holds acidity in fruit that would otherwise ripen too quickly. Chenin blanc vines planted in the 1960s still crop on a handful of Stellenbosch farms, and Cabriere began making Methode Cap Classique here in 1984, a sparkling style that has since become the valley's signature. Formal wine routes are far younger than the vineyards themselves. Stellenbosch launched South Africa's first in 1971, and Franschhoek followed with its own circuit of cellar doors. The Franschhoek Wine Tram, running since 2012, converted a disused branch line into the region's most-used loop, and its open-sided carriages now anchor a large share of Cape Winelands day trips. Travellers booking Franschhoek and Stellenbosch wine tour from Cape Town tours cross the Cape Flats and the R310 to reach estates that have been pouring, in some cases, for three centuries — a working agricultural landscape rather than a preserved one, where harvest still dictates the calendar and the gables are still repainted every few years.