South African wine's long fight for justice
South Africa's wine industry is transformed, yet apartheid still casts a shadow over its mostly poor, black workforce. I went to investigate. Plus: what I've been drinking there.
It was pruning season in the South African winter. “It was excruciatingly cold,” remembers Johan Reyneke “and I was wearing a surfing wetsuit to keep warm. And then I realised my [black] colleagues were using newspaper under their clothes. And I thought, we’ve got to fix this.”
That was the late 1990s: Reyneke’s solution, in the biodynamic wine company he founded in 2000, was to commit to buy his workers houses and to send their children to university. “It was financially disastrous,” admits Reyneke, and remains a work in progress, though the sixth employee house will be bought this year.
Such initiatives make a real difference to workers in an industry where social justice looms larger than anywhere else in the wine world. South Africa remains a profoundly unequal country where apartheid still casts a long shadow.
That legacy’s racial dynamics can come as a shock arriving from a first-world, multicultural city like London as I did last month. All of the people you see working in the fields, or walking beside the road or waiting for minibuses are, without exception, black. But just a kilometre down the road in the well-heeled wine town of Franschhoek, at least 95 per cent of the tourists in the tasting rooms and restaurants are white.
Pay is just part of the challenge. All of the producers I visited paid wages above market rates: the rural minimum wage rose just this week to R (Rand) 5,614 (£244/$306) a month – about £1.20/$1.50 an hour. For example Spier, just outside Stellenbosch, pay their field labourers R7,290/month – around a 30 per cent premium.
Yet in many places, the workforce lives on the farm as well as working there. At Bosman Wines, most of the workers and their families have lived on site for generations. Bosman has now built a crèche and community learning centre in the village near their Wellington farm, as well as a retirement complex.
Likewise when Andrew Gunn bought Iona in 1997, it came with the workers and their families in a village on the property. Today the village houses around 80 people, the extended families of 20 workers. “We have a responsibility as farmers,” says Gunn.
This is why the certification scheme run by the Wine and Agricultural Ethical Trade Association (WIETA) covers not only pay and working conditions but also includes inspection of workers’ housing, conducted every three years. Last year WIETA certified around two thirds of South African wine production: certification is required by many international wine buyers. “Any producer that is successfully exporting knows they have to do the right thing to get into foreign supermarkets,” says Cathy Brewer of Villiera Wines.
Sophia Warner has taken a different tack. She was a London special needs teacher until she came here in 2003, aged 34. “I just got sucked in,” she says, founding the Pebbles educational charity. Pebbles now helps operate centres serving 1,400 children. It offers health checks for pregnant mothers; a first-1,000-days programme for young children as well as creches and after-school clubs; mobile classrooms and libraries; social workers; clinics and dental care, and more.
At a Pebbles crèche and school I visited in Hemel-en-Aarde, taking kids of workers from nearby Creation Wines, they look after children from nine months to age 14. Kids are supposed to go to high school at age 12 but transport is a big problem in a rural area like this.. Principal Johan Van Tonder showed us round the neat classrooms with their colourful Afrikaans posters on the walls (that and Xhosa are the main languages here). One class of lively five year-olds waved goodbye to me and Carolyn Martin of Creation: “totsiens besoekers!” they chorused (“bye bye visitors!”)
In different vein, Spier’s Tree-Preneurs scheme works with poor communities in black townships and what are euphemistically termed “informal settlements’ – shantytowns – such as nearby Vlottenburg. Groups of people grow seedlings provided by Spier in back yards until they’re 60cm-plus tall, and then barter them back for bicycles, farm tools and clothing. Where a set of school clothes for a child costs a day and half’s wages – and no-one in their family may work anyway – that can be significant. Spier then donates the trees – around a million to date – to local schools and other spaces.
One source of funding for such projects is often Fairtrade, whose label is now well established in Britain. The buyer (for wine in the UK, usually a supermarket) pays a premium of around 90 cents (about four pence) per bottle. That then goes back to the producer to distribute to their workforce, though it cannot be given out as cash. Instead, a Fairtrade Committee made up of workers decides what products or programmes to invest in.
At Journey’s End, for example, the Fairtrade premium adds up to around R100,000 (£4,300/$5,400) a year: the committee has bought gas stoves and washing machines for the 19 permanent workers who are beneficiaries (up to 60 seasonal workers get pro-rata benefits.) At Du Toitskloof, in Rawsonville, Fairtrade premiums fund two daycare centres looking after 130 children aged three months to five years. They also offer after-school care, a mobile library and media centre, a clinic that sees over 200 patients a month, and four college bursaries.
And yet despite all this, it has to be said: the condition of many people in these communities remains appalling. Most of Journey’s End’s permanent workers live in the nearby informal settlement of Sir Lowry’s Pass. I visited the Mila’s Angels crèche there, funded by the winery, and a cooperative sewing project for women making shopping bags for sale. The winery also funds a soup kitchen and paid for improvements to the primary school. Yet the dilapidated shacks and the barbed wire on the gate of the crèche told their own story.
Female-headed households are the norm, in part a legacy of the apartheid government’s policy of encouraging men to go to work in the gold and diamond mines and thereby breaking up black families. Alcoholism, domestic violence and babies born with foetal alcohol syndrome are grim facts of life in places like this. The school dropout rate at Grade 7 (age 13) is around half; youth unemployment nationally is 44 per cent and must be even higher in Sir Lowry’s Pass. There is essentially no welfare safety net. Other settlements are so violent, with gangs, drugs and protection rackets, that it is unsafe to enter them. I left the village in something of a state of shock.
“You’ve got third world and first world next to each other, in your face,” says Johan Reyneke.
“We have to work together,” adds Reyneke – and to fix such problems will take generations. Those are the ambitious goals of South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment project. The government set a target in 2015 for 20 per cent of the nation’s land and water to be black owned by 2025: whites make up around seven per cent of the population but own around three quarters of privately owned land. Today, the actual total owned by black South Africans – over 80 per cent of the country’s population of 62 million – still sits at just three per cent.
“It’s a difficult thing to do,” concedes South Africa Wine’s Philip Bowes. “Other professions are better at identifying talent than the wine industry, for example accountancy.” At Stellenbosch’s Elsenburg Agricultural Training Institute – home of the country’s foremost wine training programme – just nine per cent of students are black.
“You’ve got third world and first world next to each other, in your face”
For a start, the children of farm workers desperately need better education: if anything, school standards have actually slipped since the 1990s. Beyond school, vocational training provision remains poor. Yet these are the options that young people need to improve their lives. Bosman’s Julia Moore says eight former students from the school are now at the local college studying marketing, hospitality and other subjects, up from just one in 2020.
It’s partly a question of limited horizons in poor rural families: as Sophia Warner says, “If your family have worked on a farm for generations, they don’t know what jobs there are in the industry.” And tourism is now a central component of the South African wine industry.
One training programme providing young people with an introduction to such jobs is Pinotage Youth Development Academy (PYDA), near Stellenbosch, offering training and support to unemployed 18-25 year-olds. At Delheim Wines I met wine adviser Thabang Fanana, who had studied wine and marketing at the PYDA: he did placements at wineries before coming to join the hospitality operation at Nora Sperling-Thiel’s estate. Delheim also gives winemaking space to Ntsiki Biyela, probably South Africa’s highest-profile black female winemaker, who also trained here.
Efforts are also under way to create new black wine businesses from out of successful white-owned estates. Praisy Dlamini is founder of Adama Wines, a black business spun out from Bosman Wines. She herself comes from a family of KwaZulu-Natal sugar cane farmers. But she says she became sold on a career in wine when she saw oenology students at Stellenbosch foot-treading grapes (“My mum said, ‘why would you choose this - you don’t even drink wine!’) Adama’s head office staff and winemaker are all female and black or “coloured” (the official South African designation for mix-race people). Many benefitted from bursaries or went to the PYDA, such as winemaker Ruth Faro. And two per cent of the profits from their Amandla brand in the UK and US go into student bursaries.
Kleine Zalze, meanwhile, launched Visio vintners in 2018, a company 51 per cent owned by 40 black workers in the winery and tasting room. Kleine Zalze funded their vineyard planting and branding; now they want the black employee-shareholders to take control of all its operations. Similarly at Great Heart wines, spun out of Mullineux and Leeu Family Wines with that company’s grapes and winemaking, 42 employees get dividends on their shares when they make a profit.
Can it work? When I asked Briton Alex Dale why he’d come to South Africa, he answered, “This guy” and pointed to a picture of Nelson Mandela in the lobby. He had seen the potential for winemaking here: he resigned from his winemaking job in Burgundy the day that Mandela was elected, in April 1994, to come to Stellenbosch. The atmosphere was full of hope, he recalls. And as co-founder of Radford Dale, he has for almost 20 years run the firm’s Land of Hope Trust to pay for the private education of his black employees’ children and dependents: they’re currently funding 14 children’s schooling.
Yet South Africa’s structural inequalities remain huge and deeply entrenched. Successive ANC governments since Mandela stepped down in 1999 have proved unable to effect much change. They have also become deeply mired in corruption, especially during the presidency of Jacob Zuma, 2009-18. Even in a rich country like Britain, we’re used to political despair, accustomed to frustration at how hard it is for one person or one business to make a difference. In South Africa, it’s that much harder for wine businesses doing the right thing to swim against the tide. Dale says that while some things have exceeded expectations since he came to South Africa in 1994, the ANC governments since Mandela have been a “gut-wrenching disappointment”.
And yet he, Sophia Warner, Praisy Dlamini, Nora Sperling-Thiel and the rest carry on trying to change the future for their workers and their children, one harvest at a time. “It’s a little contribution but it must start somewhere,” says Berene Sauls, black founder of Tesselaarsdal Wines. “It starts with one person.”
What I was drinking in South Africa last week
I’m home now but these are some more of the South African wines I enjoyed during my stay there.
Reyneke Reserve White 2022, Stellenbosch - classic clean, elegant Sauvignon blanc from Johan Reynecke: it has had time in oak but that influence is subtle. Fresh citrus and stone fruit, subtle, flinty minerality, longish (the 2022 doesn’t appear to be in the UK yet but the 2018, 2019 and 2021 are quite widely available: Heritage Cellars, Four Walls Wine, Vinum and elsewhere, from £23.30.)
Radford Dale Touchstone Chardonnay 2023, Elgin - Alex Dale’s Elgin vineyard (see above) makes some fine examples of wines from South Africa’s premier cool-climate region. This Chardonnay boasts crisp citrus fruit as well as lovely richness - balanced and elegant (Les Caves de Pyrene has the 2022, £23.48.)
Tesselaarsdal Pinot Noir 2023, Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge - winemaker Berene Sauls (see above) is an example of a new generation of black winemakers now coming through in South Africa, in her case after her talent was spotted by her bosses at Hamilton Russell. She still makes her wines at their winery and buys in fruit, but has Pinot Noir planted in her home area of Tesselaarsdal. Her 2023 is fragrant, fresh and very elegant, with appealing savoury notes (92 or More, Swig, Handford Wines and elsewhere, from £44.)
Bosman Erfenis 2019, Wellington - erfenis mean both “legacy” and “heritage” in Afrikaans, and this is Petrus Bosman and winemaker Corlea Fourie’s ambition for this wine. An unusual blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cinsault and Nero d’Avola, this boasts lots of sweet, spicy fruit and soft tannins; it’s well balanced and quite long - and already tasting quite mature (Woodwinters has the 2018, £33.)
Transparency declaration: I tasted all of these wines as a guest of the properties.
As someone who'd like to drink Hemel-en-Aarde dry, it is very much worth learning the full context of South Africa's wine trade
Really interesting read. Such promise in the land but the corruption and generational prejudices ren deep