Coetsenburg is an historic wine estate and one of the oldest estates in South Africa, established in 1682. It is located at the foot of the Stellenbosch Mountain, which forms part of the estate, in the town of Stellenbosch, 31 miles (50 km) east of Cape Town, in the Cape Winelands of the Western Cape Province. The estate has historically been owned by the Coetsee family and is currently not open to the public. The north-western portion of the original estate is now the Coetsenburg Sports Grounds which belongs to the University of Stellenbosch.
Name
Coetsenburg is owned by the Coetsee family which is Cape Dutch (specifically French Huguenot) in origin. Over the past centuries, the family intermarried with members of the British Establishment and, like another prominent Cape Dutch family, the Van Der Byls (Van Der Bijls), are now predominantly English-speaking. The name of the estate, Coetsenburg, is an amalgamation of the Dutch words “Coetsee s’n Burg”, a colloquial form of “Coetsee en zijn Burg”. Coetsee is the surname of the estate's founder, Dirk Coetsee, the Hoofdheemraad (Chancellor) of the District of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein through much of the 1690s and early 1700s and captain of the Stellenbosch Infantry. In Dutch and German, “burg” means “fortress, castle, citadel, stronghold or acropolis” (the first permanent European settlers in the area were primarily Dutch-speaking). Thus “Coetsenburg” means “Coetsee and his Fortress”. The incorrect form "Coetsenberg" refers to the Stellenbosch Mountain which is situated partly on Coetsenburg Estate.
The surname Coetsee is of French Huguenot origin, originally spelt de Couches. The De Couches family, which is Breton, were nobles of the Ancien Régime, seigneurs or feudal lords, which owned the medieval Château (Castle) of Couches as well as the medieval Château (Castle) of Dracy-lès-Couches. The Château de Couches is located in the commune of Couches in Saône-et-Loire, below the town, on a flat area overlooking the Creuse valley. It is one of the old fortresses of the Duchy of Burgundy and was used in particular to protect the road leading from Paris to Chalon via Autun. The Castle of Dracy-lès-Couches is located in the town of Dracy-lès-Couches in Saône-et-Loire, on the side of a slope. The family also had homes in Le Marais, Paris, which they fled after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and settled first in Amsterdam in the Dutch Republic, before moving to Kampen in the Overijssel where they Dutchified. Dirk Coetsee left the Netherlands in 1679 aboard the Asia, a Dutch East India Company ship, and settled initially in Huis Herengracht (Herengracht House) in the Herengracht (now Adderley Street) between Hout and Krotoa Place (Castle) Streets, Cape Town, in the Dutch Cape Colony before the Dutch Governor of the Cape Colony Simon van der Stel granted him land in 1682 which he named Coetsenburg.
Since surnames were only recorded for taxation purposes and many officials of the Dutch East India Company were illiterate, the surname was regularly misspelled in registries and other official records and thus there are a number of variations of the surname in South Africa, e.g. Coetzee, Coetse, Coussé. Coetsenburg is often incorrectly spelt Coetzenburg. A branch of the Coetsee family became Anglicized through intermarriage after the British conquest of the Dutch Cape Colony in 1795 and Coetsenburg is now under their custodianship.