The estate's shape was set long before the Rupert family arrived. Land here was granted to the German settler Hans Hendrik Hattingh in 1695 and bought fourteen years later by the French Huguenot Pierre Joubert, who named it for La Motte d'Aigues, the Provençal village of his birth. Vines went into the ground in 1752, and the Historic Cellar, dated 1782 and now a provincial monument, still holds vats lettered with the names of the Huguenot families who first worked this soil.

Dr Anton Rupert bought La Motte in 1970 and began the restoration that shaped what exists today. His daughter, Hanneli Rupert-Koegelenberg, now runs the estate with her husband Hein Koegelenberg, and her touch is visible wherever art appears here, from the sculptures commissioned along the drive to the gallery she keeps in near constant rotation, an instinct inherited from her parents, who founded the Rupert Art Foundation in 1964. The current show, Among the Trees, gathers twelve South African artists working in ceramics, textiles, sound and paint around the pause between winter and spring, among them Chloë Wallace, who presses leaves and insect wings into porcelain, and Conrad Oosthuizen, whose accompanying work turns botanical data into sound. Toby Megaw's four-metre Wine Bearer meets you as you drive in, the first of nine sculptures scattered across the property.